Amid the cascading disclosures about National Security Agency surveillance programs, the top lawyer in the U.S. intelligence community opened his remarks at a rare public appearance last week with a lament about how much of the information being spilled was wrong.
"A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on," said Robert Litt, citing a line often attributed to Mark Twain. "Unfortunately, there's been a lot of misinformation that's come out about these programs."
The remark by Litt, general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, was aimed at news organizations. But details that have emerged from the exposure of hundreds of pages of previously classified NSA documents indicate that public assertions about these programs by senior U.S. officials also have often been misleading, erroneous or simply false.
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