Newly Obtained Emails Contradict Administration Claims on Guardian Laptop Destruction

Also, recall how we have constantly heard from people like Sen. Dianne Feinstein and even the president himself that when the government collects "only metadata," that does not even constitute real spying (it "is not surveillance," Feinstein wrote; "we don't have a domestic spying program," proclaimed Obama). Yet here, the administration is concealing not only virtually all of its own email content but also substantial portions of the metadata of those emails:

In justifying its concealments, the administration has the audacity to claim that disclosure "would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of privacy."

So the Obama administration is apparently capable of recognizing how invasive metadata can be when it comes to its own. Thus, we are not even permitted to know which of our public officials participated in this little celebration over British attacks on press freedom, let alone what they said.

Speaking of making a complete farce out of FOIA, AP notes that "Clapper's office -- following a separate, identical records request from the AP -- said it had no records about the incident, even though Clapper's email from his national intelligence director's office account was part of the NSA document release." What could possibly justify that?

(3) It's worth noting that neither the destruction of The Guardian hard drives which U.S. officials were celebrating, nor the seizure of my partner's electronic goods, had the slightest impact on our ability to report on these documents. There were, needless to say, multiple copies of these archives in multiple safe places around the world. They were thus celebrating something that imposed no impediment whatsoever on disclosure of these materials. As usual for the U.S. and U.K. security services, then, their behavior was as inept as it was thuggish.

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There are several follow-ups to note from our story on Wednesday about NSA and FBI spying on prominent Muslim Americans:

(1) According to a report in The Arab Daily News, "several Muslim American organizations have announced their intentions to file lawsuits against the U.S. Government over FBI spying that targeted American citizens who are of the Muslim religion and Arab heritage, and are demanding investigations by Federal authorities." As noted in our article, vesting people with "standing" to sue over the legality and constitutionality of these spying activities was a major reason why Snowden provided this information, and I am quite certain this will not be the last lawsuit filed in response to our report.

(2) As we reported on Wednesday, "a coalition of 44 civil rights groups organized by the American Civil Liberties Union has sent a letter to President Obama demanding a 'full public accounting' of the government's 'targeting of community leaders' for surveillance." Members of Congress, including Rep. Keith Ellison, Alan Grayson, and Sen. Ron Wyden, spoke out. Meanwhile, "the White House told the Guardian that it has asked the intelligence community to 'review their training and policy materials for racial or religious bias" after we published an internal instructional memo that referred to a hypothetical surveillance target as 'Mohammed Raghead.'" That's a nice step, but the fact that this is the only review the White House thinks is needed -- and not the spying itself -- is quite telling.

(3) Among the best commentaries on the implications of our story are those from Kade Crockford of the ACLU of Massachusetts, Marcy Wheeler in Salon, Digby, and Amy Davidson in the New Yorker. Among the better media reports on the story were articles in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

(4) Two of the people named in our story, Faisal Gill and Asim Ghafoor, spoke both to CNN and Democracy Now about their reactions to learning they had been monitored. Meanwhile, CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad has a great essay inTime describing his reaction to learning he had been subject to surveillance.

(5) Vocal NSA loyalist Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution argued that we can't possibly know whether this spying was legitimate unless and until we see the "relevant FISA applications." He then later announced that he would be opposed to release of those applications. In other words, he does not want to see -- and does not want anyone else to see -- the only documents that he believes could reveal NSA abuse. That, in a nutshell, is the mindset of the NSA loyalist.

Apparently, in the 1960s and 1970s, Wittes and allies would have been arguing that it was impossible to say whether J. Edgar Hoover's targeting of anti-war protesters, civil rights leaders and other government critics was appropriate unless and until we could read Hoover's personal files about those targets. After all, could anyone prove the negative that these weren't dangerous and violent people? And, of course, there was no shortage of Americans back then who wanted those groups surveilled on the ground that they posed threats to the prevailing order, just as there are many who today want their fellow citizens surveilled who are Muslim.

(6) A new Huffington Post/YouGov poll finds that "Most Americans think government surveillance that gathers up masses of telephone and Internet data goes 'too far.'"

(7) Here are two excellent essays, published prior to our story, on why some non-Muslims react with indifference and boredom to revelations of NSA overreach: by Julian Sanchez and Anna Lekas Miller. As those essays demonstrate, a major reason so many US Government abuses (from indefinite detention to drones to rendition to pervasive surveillance) have been tolerated over the last decade is because people like that perceive that it's only happening to Muslims -- not to them or people like them -- and so it's irrelevant and/or justified.