The Washington Post calls it “The NSA slide you haven’t seen” when it should have simply said “Another NSA slide you haven’t seen.”

At the current rate, the thirty-some remaining slides that Edward Snowden leaked to the Post and The Guardian will all have been published sometime towards the end of this decade.

The new report says, “A classified NSA slide obtained by The Washington Post and published here for the first time,” insinuating that this might not have come from Snowden, but if it wasn’t part of the 41-slide collection he leaked, then I would surmise this was an authorized leak. The only difference from a similar slide previously published by The Guardian is in the background image. It earlier showed the world, but now shows North America.

Perhaps the NSA feels that the revised slide will better evoke a sense that its surveillance operations target foreign communications entering the U.S. rather than functioning as a global drag net. Perhaps the NSA’s concern is that circles on each slide which could be taken to identify data collection points, should not point to locations in South America, East Africa, and the Indian Ocean, but instead to the Eastern and Western United States.

Either way, I suspect the Post published this slide at the behest of the NSA.