60 Minutes Puff Piece Claims NSA Saved U.S. From Cyberterrorism
Well, don’t we feel just a little bit ashamed today. While we’ve been whining about trivia like the frightening scope of the NSA’s domestic spying programs – scooping up all our cell phone records, wiretapping American tech companies – the criminally poor oversight provided by rubber stamp lawmakers, and the flagrant lies of top level spooks like DNI James Clapper, the poor misunderstood folks at Ft. Meade have been quietly saving each and one of us from a Chinese plot to destroy all of our computers. Every last one of them. The computer on which I’m typing was rescued from ruin by NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander. I tweet and blog under the blanket of the very freedom that he provides.
That was one of the things I learned from last night’s 60 Minutes’ half-hour video love letter to the NSA. While “a twentysomething-year-old high school dropout contractor” named Edward Snowden is making all this trouble, better schooled NSA experts are protecting us from malware.
The thwarted “BIOS plot” was an attempt by China (we’re told) to promulgate a fake BIOS update that would have bricked every machine in the America, destroying the U.S. economy. The claim is so preposterous on its face that even 60 Minutes interviewer John Miller remarks on camera that “it has a kind of a little Dr. Evil quality to it … It sounds almost unbelievable,” before believing the story and moving on without demanding more details.
