Thread by @rebelcinder

.@Dahlialithwick, mid-righteous takedown of the #Kraken lawyers, suddenly veers off topic, declaring "Tucker Carlson isn’t being surveilled by the NSA", and that that's a "lie" of the same publicly manifest sort that "Biden stole the election" is a lie. slate.com/news-and-polit…

To believe the Big Lie that "Biden stole the election", you need to disbelieve a huge array of public evidence, reviewed by disparate courts, all tending to the conclusion that Biden won.

To believe that "NSA is surveilling Tucker Carlson", you need only to disbelieve NSA.

It's not terribly likely that Carlson is a "target" of NSA surveillance - which is what NSA's denial was oriented towards denying

washingtonpost.com/media/2021/06/…

But frankly, you have to be a fucking rookie in the surveillance world to equate "not a target" with "not being surveilled"

NSA's "targets" are indeed non-U.S. persons. But the law permits NSA to surveil the communications of a target's contacts, and their contacts as well. For Carlson to be under NSA surveillance, he only needs to have ordered pizza from the same place as a non-U.S. person target.

I'd be astounded, given Carlson's extremely wide circle of contacts, if none of his contacts were not in turn in contact with a "target."

Carlson, who doesn't seem super well versed in such things, asks the dumb question, "Did the Biden administration read my personal emails?"

Why is this dumb?

Because:

a) it's very likely that somewhere in the "corporate store", NSA has intercepted emails to or from him

b) there are many layers of nonhuman algorithmic parsing for threats between a given email and a human analyst

so c) this isn't Nixon with an "enemies list", this is tens of millions of Americans dusted with a faint patina of suspicion

There'd be further layers before a given threatening email reached the eyes of anyone who could be termed part of the "Biden administration"

But that doesn't make this "not a problem"

Governments, including ones Biden has been a part of, have targeted journalists

Assange. Atkisson. Greenwald. Nakashima. Rosen. It's a long and sorry history, and it keeps happening, under both Republican and Democratic presidents.

So it's even possible that we'll find out, in a few years, that Carlson was in fact a target.

The non-sequitur assertion that that's a lie, shows only that @Dahlialithwick trusts this government enough to believe Biden's NSA when it says it didn't surveil him

I hope she's right