Ron Rosenbaum - the man who jump-started my career with his Esquire article "Secrets of the Little Blue Box" - has an interesting observation...
"My fellow espionage obsessive Gil Roth sent me a link to the National Security Archive’s release on the CIA “Family Jewels” document dump which contained what has got to be the Greatest Euphemism ever coined...
What I found interesting and unremarked in the coverage of the memos was a remarkable passage in memo (#2 in the National Security Archive link) is that it’s very specific about many instances of illicit surveillance and telephone tapping, naming a handful of specific individuals as targets. And then there is one final paragraph that suddenly drops all pretense to transparency. Becomes astonishingly vague and opaque. Hence the potentially explosive euphemism.
According to this paragraph “the CIA occasionally tests experimental equipment on American telephone circuits. The CIA apparently has established guidelines for these tests which provide, among other things that no records may be kept, not tape and so forth.”
Tests experimental eavesdropping devices on American telephone equipment? And just how widespread are these tests” and how long to they go on. Do they test whether they can listen into to every conversation a given subject has. Wording like that would give them latitude. Wording like that seems designed to cover up more than it reveals.
There is a scandal here, I suspect, one that may turn out to have foreshadowed the NSA warrantless wireptapping scandal." (more)
