On Semantics

per·ju·ry

noun, plural per·ju·ries. Law.

the willful giving of false testimony under oath or affirmation, before a competent tribunal, upon a point material to a legal inquiry.

 

From the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, March 12, 2013:

 

Senator Wyden:

"...give me a yes or no answer to the question, does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”

 

Clapper:

“No, sir.”

From the interview NBC's Andrea Mitchell did with Clapper:

 "I think a lot of what people are reading and seeing in the media is hyperbole. A metaphor I think might be helpful for people to understand this..."

blah blah blah library and Dewey Decimal.

Ms. Mitchell: Senator Wyden made quite a lot out of your exchange with him last March during the hearings. Can you explain what you meant when you said there was not data collection on millions of Americans?

Director Clapper: First, as I said, I have great respect for Senator Wyden. I thought though in retrospect I was asked when are you going to start--stop beating your wife kind of question which is, meaning not answerable necessarily, by a simple yes or no. So I responded in what I thought was the most truthful or least most untruthful manner, by saying, “No.” And again, going back to my metaphor, what I was thinking of is looking at the Dewey Decimal numbers of those books in the metaphorical library. To me collection of U.S. Persons data would mean taking the books off the shelf, opening it up and reading it.

And later:

Director Clapper: This has to do of course, somewhat of a semantic perhaps some would say too cute by half, but there are honest differences on the semantics when someone says “collection” to me, that has a specific meaning, which may have a different meaning to him.

hy·per·bo·le

noun Rhetoric .

1. obvious and intentional exaggeration.

2. an extravagant statement or figure of speech not intended to be taken literally, as “to wait an eternity.”

met·a·phor

noun

1. a figure of speech in which a term or phrase is applied to something to which it is not literally applicable in order to suggest a resemblance, as in “A mighty fortress is our God.” Compare mixed metaphor, simile (  def 1 ) .

2. something used, or regarded as being used, to represent something else; emblem; symbol.

 

least  most un·truth·ful

to the smallest extent, in the greatest degree, diverging from or contrary to the truth; to the smallest extent, in the greatest degree, not corresponding with fact or reality.

 

What do we learn from this?

A) Clapper was an English major. B) Facts and truth are extravagant and not to be taken literally. C) When asked a direct question and instructed to answer "yes or no," unable to shield yourself from evasion by bombastic prose, subsequently explain your false statement by combining antonyms, negatives, and colloquialisms until no one can be sure of what it is you exactly said. D) If I steal your credit card but don't use it, that's totally cool. Trust me. I have no intention of using it, I don't even want to use it. Really. E) And if I have lots of people's credit cards? It is not a collection, because I choose to use a different definition of the word than you do.

Clinton: The meaning of the word is is?

Oh! Thank you, Jody Westby, for explaining why the NSA is, in fact, NOT collecting data on American citizens:

"Basically, for stored data, the FBI collects the data, NSA analysts query the data through an FBI middle person who supposedly assures the target is not a U.S. citizen, and the system passes hits on the search terms back to the NSA."

And for posterity:

Senator Wyden:

"...give me a yes or no answer to the question, does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”

 

Clapper:

“No, sir.”

The following phrase is used in the introduction in the document from the Senate intelligence hearing dated March 12, 2013:

"altering the vocabulary of intelligence"

Yes, I believe Clapper has altered the vocabulary of intelligence. I must now redirect to Exhibit A; the definition of "perjury."

This brings us to a valid point:

 

Ms. Mitchell: The President and you and the others in this Top Secret world are saying, “Trust us. We have your best interest. We’re not invading your privacy. We’re going after bad guys. We’re not going after your personal lives.” What happens when you’re gone, when this President or others in our government are gone? There could be another White House that breaks the law. There could be another DNI who does really bad things. We listened during the Watergate years to those tapes where the President of the United Staes saying, “Fire bomb the Brookings Institution.” You know, what do you say to the American people about the next regime who has all these secrets? Do they live forever somewhere in a computer?

Director Clapper: No they don’t live forever. That's a valid concern, I think. People come and go, Presidents come and go. Administrations come and go. DNIs will come and go. But what is, I think, important about our system is our system of laws, our checks and balances. You know, I think the Founding Fathers would actually be pretty impressed with how what they wrote, and the organizing principles for the country are still valid and are still used even to regulate a technology that they never foresaw. So that’s timeless, those are part of our institutions. Are there people that will abuse these institutions? Yes, but we have a system that sooner or later, mostly sooner these days, those misdeeds are found out

Did Clapper have his fingers crossed behind his back when he said this? Has he read the Constitution? How about the Bill of Rights? And when "misdeeds" are reported to the press because using the grievance reporting system in place would most likely result in retribution by the corrupted government? Why, scream "Treason," of course!

I implore you to read this article from USA Today dated May 10, 2006. How many whistleblowers need to blow their whistles before somebody notices?

Ms. Mitchell: Now there’s been another leak, in the last couple days. This one is another Top Secret order, ordering -- from the President – ordering senior intelligence officials to draw up a list of potential overseas targets for cyber attack. How do you deal with a situation where there is a leak a day it seems of Top Secret information?

Director Clapper: Well, it’s hard to deal with. It is again as in the case of this Presidential Directive an egregious violation of a sacred trust. That anyone who would have access to this would choose on his or her own, to violate that trust and disseminate this to the media. I would be surprised if anyone else were surprised if we weren’t at least thinking about our behavior in the cyber domain. And so what this does is lay out a conceptual framework to include some definitions, for how we think about that.

But American citizens' private information would never make it into the wrong hands, to be used for purposes other than collecting dust like an unopended book...

(As an aside, the following quote was also taken from the Senate intelligence hearing document:

"The Intelligence Community must continue to promote collaboration among experts in every field, from the political and social sciences to natural sciences,medicine, military issues, and space."

This supports my personal suspicion that the national public school curriculum refered to as "Common Core" and the forced implementation of electronic medical records nationally are actually both a ruse for the purpose of data mining. Hey, didn't George Orwell write this?)