NSA == Vaccines?

There's been a lot of hoopla around Edward Snowden's leaked slides which suggest that there's a massive NSA data gathering scheme in effect. But, what do we really know? So far we have the following primary data:
1. Edward Snowden's claim that these projects exist. He's an NSA contractor.
2. Edward Snowden's leaked slides about PRISM (there are supposedly 41 slides, and so far I think 8 have been leaked - why only 8??)
3. Edward Snowden's leaked slides about X-Keyscore

We then have independent reporting from The Guardian and The Washington Post based on this information, referencing nothing more than "top secret documents". We then have a bunch of me-too articles that basically rehash the above info and add conjecture based on quote snippets.

Let's start by examining the provided data for a moment. We have one whistleblower's claims and a subset of slides. The only slide that actually indicates the program exists is the one about signup dates of the various key players (interestingly, Skype was on a Sunday ... seems a touch odd, also why are the copies in the The Guardian and The Post different??). All other slides just have high-level descriptions of a system. These could be a report to higher ups about a working system, or a high-level spec used to get buyoff on or evaluate a project. Hell, for all we know the whole thing could be fake (also randomly curious: why are two of the leaked slides shown with a red-bordered logo, while the others are not like this - these things tend to come from a template). Why is there stuff redacted in the slides? Did Snowden do this? Who knows if these slides were produced by a conglomerate of people, but the slides show two different composition styles (granted this is very fuzzy): some are fairly polished looking, others look like a high schooler's first attempt at PowerPoint. Most importantly, if he has all the slides, why not release them all? What is he saving them for? Or what's he not wanting to share with us?

Now let's examine additional data. The biggest quote bundle is coming from Henry Clapper, who has stated that a) the reports contain numerous inaccuracies and b) that it's absolutely awful that data about programs was leaked. This could be taken in several ways:
1. It's awful that people now know about PRISM. The report was inaccurate because we actually call it BANANAS and it actually involves every company on earth.
2. It's awful that we can't trust people to keep secret things secret that they promised to keep secret. By having a lack of trust, how can we continue any clandestine programs safely?  Also, the report is inaccurate because it's not about broad data collection, but rather a streamlined process by which we request targeted data about specific users (for which we have broad, bilateral confirmation). Also, it's called BANANAS.

The knee-jerk reaction to a lack of total denial is "ah, see, they are hiding stuff!" Of course they are, they're the freakin' NSA. Everything they do is secret. Hell, people who work for them aren't even supposed to tell people where they work. Also, definitive statements give information to the outside world. Less specific comments don't. The general policy here is "we don't comment on such matters", right?

There are striking similarities to the anti-vaccine movement that gained steam about 10 years ago. It all started with a "whistleblower" (Andrew Wakefield) who presented "evidence" (a very poor piece of research) that MMR vaccines and/or the thimerosal in some vaccines could be directly linked to the rise in autism. The media, in general, blew this story up. Not being able to find any other scientists to take Wakefield's side, they relied on "debates" and "perspectives" involving angry moms of autistic kids (guess which side they took). They took an immensely complicated scientific topic and tried to boil it down; they boiled too far and too fast, leaving only charred ashes in the bottom of the pot. They neglected to check Wakefield's background (attention seeker), his study's background (funded by a law firm to specifically go prove this link) and the scientific reaction to the study (total rejection - that it was published to begin with is some bizarre miracle). They also seized on the technically correct, but awkwardly worded, statements from the CDC and other scientific bodies who refused to say "there is proof of no causation or correlation", because scientists never say that. They can't, technically, be sure that there never has been, isn't, or never will be a causation in every single case, ever. The story, built on fear, emotion and knee-jerk reactions to bad information, spiraled out of control until the public had no idea what to believe anymore.

My main takeaway is that if the evidence seems sketchy or convoluted, or has gaps, or is in any other way not a definitive piece of data with clear context, we should be extra careful before we believe it and the downstream analysis of it: there's still a very real chance that, as the author of The Panic Virus wrote, "it turned out that it wasn't a house of cards, but that there were no cards at all."