As a fellow journalist and blogger I will not complain about being misunderstood by any reader who was confused by the question I asked at the end of the news blog post I wrote today that you lambaste above, but I will state simply that I think you are basing your criticism on a completely false premise. The summary of your blog post that appears above says this about my post: "Britain convicts Terrorists entirely within the law; the NYT claims that's proof that law-breaking is necessary."

The fact is that I wrote nothing of the kind. I wrote an explanatory news blog post laying out the information that e-mail intercepted by the N.S.A. was apparently a key element in the convictions in this case. This was all over the British press, but it was not much mentioned here in the United States -- that was the purpose of my post, to spread that information more widely. The non-nefarious purpose of doing that? I thought it was interesting.

At the end of that post, I tried to start a reader discussion on the issue of privacy and surveillance by asking if anyone who is generally opposed to allowing the government to read private e-mails would reconsider their position at all when confronted with an example, like this, of surveillance by the N.S.A. apparently preventing a terrorist attack. That question is not, as you clearly assume -- and assume based on nothing in the post itself or on anything else I have ever written or said on this subject or any other -- a sly way of saying that these convictions are "proof" of that the N.S.A. should be given unchecked authority to spy on Americans or non-Americans. (As a dual citizen of the United States and another country, I do not assume or agree that unchecked surveillance of non-Americans is not also a problem.)

The main problem with your critique above is that it assumes that my attempt to generate reader discussion after my post, by raising something tangential, was the whole reason the explanatory news blog post was written. But it simply was not. The news blog I work on is not a forum for my views -- that is not how any blog on the news side of The Times works -- but, perhaps more importantly for you and your readers, I simply do not have the views you assumed I have or was trying to advocate by asking that question. You have assigned them to me.

I am certainly responsible for not making myself clear enough -- I wrote my question to readers too quickly and should have laid out the ways that the N.S.A.'s work in this case was different than the work it has done that has been the focus of controversy in the United States. But I think it is fair to say that you've made some large assumptions about who I am and why I wrote this post that are simply baseless. Before you tear into people for holding or advocating views that you disagree with, it really might be better if you were more certain that they actually held or advocated them.