http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304302704579332393806457848?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
Now that President Obama’s promise in December of a “pretty definitive statement” about the nation’s electronic intelligence-gathering practices has been fulfilled with Friday’s speech, it is worth looking at what will actually happen as a result, at least in the near term, and what won’t.
The speech was preceded by seven months of arguably the most damaging leaks of national-security information—how we collect electronic intelligence—in the nation’s history, as the result of disclosures by former government contractor Edward Snowden. Yet the president made no recommendation as to how such leaks might be stopped.
To be sure, he mentioned the “avalanche of unauthorized disclosures” that resulted in “revealing methods to our adversaries that could impact our operations . . . for years to come.” But the rhetorical afterburners immediately kicked in to carry us to a higher altitude: “[T]he task before us now is greater than simply repairing the damage done to our operations or preventing more disclosures from taking place in the future.”
Forgive this brief demurrer, but consider: A young man gets a medical discharge from the military notwithstanding that his avocations include kickboxing, then has a rocky and brief tenure at the CIA that ends with his negotiated retention of his security clearance—which allowed him then to be employed by a military contractor in a job that gave him access to the secrets he later leaked—and then he manages to disable a complex computer system and steal more than a million-and-a-half documents. Are we not entitled at least to some brief assurance that the holes in the system that allowed Edward Snowden to do what he did have been sewn up?