Director of National Intelligence issues cleverly worded denial of spying allegations published by French paper

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper officially responded on Wednesday to reports of National Security Agency (NSA) spying published by French newspaper Le Monde in the form of a cleverly worded denial.

Like previous denials issued by companies implicated in the PRISM program, Clapper’s statement is little more than a word game that allows the agency to maintain some plausible deniability.

In the statement, Clapper claimed that the Le Monde articles “contain inaccurate and misleading information regarding U.S. foreign intelligence activities.”

“The allegation that the National Security Agency collected more than 70 million ‘recordings of French citizens’ telephone data’ is false,” Clapper stated.

Tim Cushing of TechDirt points out that Clapper appears to be capitalizing on the convoluted wording used by Le Monde in order to issue this denial.

Clapper denies separate allegations of collecting phone data and recording calls by “cherry-picking a single badly written (or translated) sentence,” according to Cushing.

In an Associated Press article published Monday, the NSA’s activities in France are detailed with a bit more specificity.

The article notes that the NSA collected metadata on over 70 million phone calls and intercepted the actual calls of particular phone numbers, utilizing different collection processes as Le Monde also reported.

“When certain French phone numbers are dialed, a signal is activated that triggers the automatic recording of certain conversations,” Le Monde reported. “This surveillance also recovers SMS and content based on keywords.”

By conflating the nuanced reporting of the NSA activities in France, Clapper can easily deny it with a broad brush stroke without directly dealing with anything.

“While we are not going to discuss the details of our activities, we have repeatedly made it clear that the United States gathers intelligence of the type gathered by all nations,” Clapper continued.

“The U.S. collects intelligence to protect the nation, its interests, and its allies from, among other things, threats such as terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction,” he stated.

Indeed, many countries currently gather intelligence. Even France has a massive domestic surveillance program.

Cushing asserts that the French government’s apparent outrage might actually be an attempt to shift criticism away from their own program.

Ultimately, Clapper states that the relationship between France and America will continue unaffected.

“The United States values our longstanding friendship and alliance with France and we will continue to cooperate on security and intelligence matters going forward,” Clapper said.

Cushing says this sounds somewhat like the cozy relationship between the NSA and Britain’s GCHQ.

Clapper’s defense is quite interesting, especially given the fact that the “White House did acknowledge that the reports do raise legitimate questions, especially in how the United States treats its friends and allies,” according to CNET.

Still, Clapper is clearly not going to stop defending all of the agency’s activities as he has in the past.