How the US intelligence community attempts to rebrand itself -- on Tumblr

Tumblr is one of the centerpieces of the intelligence community’s attempts at rebranding in the wake of what it considers a crisis wrought by Edward Snowden: a web clearinghouse of formerly classified documents related to the National Security Agency’s sweeping surveillance authorities, an exercise in transparency.

But the documents on the site are most often presented without a critical disclosure. While statements accompanying them refer to decisions by director James Clapper and other administration officials to release the surveillance-related information, nearly all the instances of such declassification – eight out of 12 – came to be published only after the government lost transparency cases, a fact that the Tumblr, known as IC On The Record, most often omits or obscures.