Based on these facts, it seems to me that the story here isn’t ‘NSA helped spy on U.S. lawyers.’ Rather, the story here is more like ‘Australian government obtained legal guidance from NSA General Counsel’s Office on what to do when Australian monitoring of a foreign government includes attorney/client communications between the government and its U.S law firm.’ Of course, that’s not as shocking a story. And presumably it’s not something that lands on the front page of the Sunday Times. But it’s a more accurate reflection of the facts, at least based on the facts found in the story.

Perhaps there are other facts not found in the story that would make the event it reports more troubling. For example, if we knew what advice the General Counsel’s Office gave, perhaps the substance of that advice would be troubling. Similarly, if we knew that the useful intelligence the Australians provided was somehow connected to the law firm, then perhaps that would be troubling. But just based on the story as it was published, it seems to me that we don’t actually know either of those things. We don’t know what advice the NSA General Counsel’s Office gave. And we don’t know if the useful intelligence that the Australians provided had anything at all to do with the law firm. We just know that monitoring began; a subset of that monitoring triggered concerns; legal advice was provided; and then monitoring continued.

This raises a broader problem with some of the reports based on the Snowden documents. With some reports, the documents largely speak for themselves. Opinions from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court can tell you a lot just from reading them. But in other cases, the documents leave a lot of open questions.