I think it evokes such incredulity that someone could point it out in good faith while also technically possibly being a correct statement that it's just humourous by itself.
It's got the irony that evidence is not evidence unless people know about it and the fact the agency is known for hiding what they do from even the institutions that are supposed to oversee it.
You've got the leap of faith to take at face value that an agency that denied a program existed for years, continued the program for years after it was pointed out it was illegal has said it's not doing it anymore.
The relative recentness of the actions by specifying 2019.
At the time the program was shut down in 2019, it was completely legal, having been written into law. You are claiming that the NSA is doing something illegal, yet in the vast trove of documents that Snowden released, there was only one program that was possibly illegal.
Prior to Snowden's leaks, I would have been more open to believing they were involved in the type of extralegal activities the CIA was notorious for, but after Snowden's leaks, it became clear that this wasn't the case. Suppose Snowden were the SharePoint admin at your company and leaked all its documents to the press. Do you think there would be only one questionably legal program in there?
It wasn't even questionably legal for 4 years where it was publicly known to be illegal let alone the length of time before that while it was operating in secret. That would be like saying drinking alcohol during prohibition was questionably legal which is flat out wrong no matter your morality.
I can guarantee you that 1 in 400 of our projects by budget at my work aren't ilegal or could even have questions raised about their legality. Like most companies if we found a project that was illegal or found an employee was routinely breaking local law to do his job that would be fixed immediately not in 4 years while we waited for it to become legal. And if it turned out I was wrong and people where purposefully commiting crimes against my fellow countrymen I'd be cheering the whistleblower who brought it to light while looking for a different job that wasn't such a cesspit of moral compromise.
The silliest part about your statements is you seem to be ignoring the problem by focusinng on only (I won't even say positives because your just saying it is no longer illegal and that there is no up to the minute evidence from inside a secret organization) the neutrals in the situation. You're doing the equivalent of saying yes the arsonist set fires and destroyed 1000s of acres but isn't the sunset pretty because of the smoke. Oh and look the firetrucks put out the fire after only a couple of hikers died. Plus people did want to do a controlled burn of that forest at some point so we shouldn't take away his lighter and certainly shouldn't charge him.
> It wasn't even questionably legal for 4 years where it was publicly known to be illegal let alone the length of time before that while it was operating in secret.
Smith v. Maryland makes it constitutional. Whether it was authorized by the PATRIOT Act was not clear, but their lawyers provided justification.
> I can guarantee you that 1 in 400 of our projects by budget at my work aren't ilegal or could even have questions raised about their legality.
Snowden could see the documents describing all the programs, but there was only one program that was questionably legal in there.
> And if it turned out I was wrong and people where purposefully commiting crimes against my fellow countrymen I'd be cheering the whistleblower who brought it to light while looking for a different job that wasn't such a cesspit of moral compromise.
What if the "whistleblower" also released the documents for all the other programs that were clearly legal? I guarantee you if the SharePoint admin at your company released all the internal documents, there would be at least one crime in there. Does that make it right for all SharePoint admins at every large company to always publicly release all the documents on their servers? I certainly wouldn't cheer them at my company, especially if they released documents helping competitors, like a list of compromised Chinese networks and when they were compromised.
> The silliest part
is that what North Korea is doing would be clearly illegal in the US, but pueblito claims that the NSA is doing worse without any evidence and with the evidence from Snowden's leaks showing that the NSA at least tries very hard to follow the law.
This is an amazing sentence.