"
German journalists about working with the Snowden documents" (note the obvious danger of allowing everything to be controlled by one source):
"In August 2013, Der Spiegel published charts from this tool that were
initially interpreted as showing how many data NSA collected from
several European countries. Soon, BND and NSA denied this and explained
that the charts show data that European agencies provided to the
Americans.
Holger Stark admitted that their initial interpretation was apparently
not correct, but that there are still many questions about this issue.
One of the difficulties was that NSA and US government were not willing
to respond to questions about this program, so they decided to publish
their best guess. Rosenbach added that major foreign papers also shared
their initial interpretation (maybe because the wrong interpretation came from Greenwald?)."
and:
"One document that wasn't published, but only reported about is the National Intelligence Priority Framework (NIPF), which contains the priorities for the US intelligence community as set by the White House. . . . this bureaucratic process illustrates that NSA isn't an agency that went
rogue, but that they are directed by the political information needs
from the White House (something that was usually conveniently ignored)."
and:
"The MONSTERMIND system was first disclosed in a very long interview
that James Bamford had with Edward Snowden in August 2014. There,
Snowden said that MONSTERMIND is a frightening program that automated
"the process of hunting for the beginnings of a foreign cyberattack".
It could also automatically prevent attacks from entering the country,
but its unique capability is that "instead of simply detecting and
killing the malware at the point of entry, MonsterMind would
automatically fire back, with no human involvement" - with the risk of
hitting the wrong one, as Snowden warned.
The "killing" capability was also described in Eckert's documentary, but
without mentioning the codename MONSTERMIND. It didn't became clear
whether this just came from Snowden's recollection or that it's
mentioned in the CYBERCOP presentation (or other documents)."
and:
"Contrary to some claims made by the US government, there seemed to be
little danger that these documents could endanger the lives of
operatives or other people. The work that NSA does is highly technical
and therefore the documents hardly contain any names. Most of the names
they do contain are of authors, not of operative field agents."
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