Comment by dragonwriter
12 years ago
Specifically, he denies direct NSA access to the systems, and says that NSA would need to use a court process to gain such access, but the report is that the UK's GCHQ is actually tapping the systems and the GCHQ is sharing the captured data with NSA.
More importantly, he was never asked if they had access to the information passing _between_ datacenters, and so his reply was technically correct. "We don't collect that under this program", "We don't have access to those _servers_", etc (emphasis added).
Politicians are often adept at replying very carefully to questioning by congress or courts so that they can be entirely truthful when answering your questions, all while avoiding telling you what you really needed to know because you never asked the right question.