Re: Edward Snowden isn't very good at logic (and neither is the NSA)
My reading of what was said is different.
NSA previously said that they had no record of Snowdon raising concerns to them. Now they release an email that contradicts this assertion.
No, the email they released has nothing to do with the concerns he claims to have raised. They released the email as the sole piece of email from him that they claim to still have.
This is not unheard of.
Many organizations in the US permanently delete any email older than some certain term. This is because (at least in the US) unless you can show that you have and follow such a retention policy, you can be required to search all of your storage for emails relevant to litigation.
That there is a single email does not mean that there are necessarily any others. However, it does put into doubt the NSAs assertion that such emails don't exist.
Why? The email presented wasn't relevant to the conversation Snowden purported to have. If the content of the email that was released even touched on Snowden's concerns, you'd have a point. But instead, "[t]hat email contained a seemingly innocuous question about a legal matter and did not raise any specific objections to any NSA programs."
It's not really anything to do with logic.
Well, then, purple unicorns: I win!
It is a question of one man's assertion against a contrary assertion by the NSA. The question is one of trust. Do we take the word of Snowdon against the word of the NSA?
There's a third option you're missing here, and that is that they're both trying to manipulate us. This is where logic is useful. We can analyze their statements (as I did) and determine if they are reasonable. In this case, both parties' statements are not rational, but as I showed, are clearly skewed to presume their side's version of events.
Given the choice of trusting Snowden or the NSA, I choose neither, because that's the logical choice.