White House Tries To Rewrite Interview With NSA

Another day, another NSA revelation... and, you know what, the White House has had enough.

On Thursday night, the Washington Post published top-secret audit documents proving the NSA oversteps its agreed privacy boundaries "thousands of time each year." You know, on top of everything else we've found out about the NSA's lack of boundaries. The audits had been provided to WaPo months before by Edward Snowden. (We know — it's all blurring into one, privacy-invading story at this point.)

Just before it went live, the journalist who wrote and broke the story — WaPo's Putlizer Prize-winning Barton Gellman — asked the White House to comment. The White House asked an NSA official, John DeLong, to comment on its behalf. Gellman interviewed DeLong for an hour and a half, under the agreement that DeLong's name and title could be used, at least for the most part.

Normally, Gellman wouldn't have let the White House check the quotes he gathered to include in his story, but because they were dealing with classified documents, he went ahead and ran it past them. The White House took one look and was like, "Uh, no," instead sending Gellman a pre-prepared statement of information he could attribute to DeLong. (You can read these here.)

The Washington Post went ahead and published the original quotes anyway, which basically amounts to flipping off the White House.

Good luck, guys...