Recent Analysis of the Snowden Leaks

A year later, Edward Snowden's leaks remain controversial. There have been two good articles in the last week that are worth reading, and they do a good job of outlining some of the intelligence challenges involved with the NSA's controversial data collection efforts. First, from Mark Stout at War is Boring publishes a great piece in WOTR's (w)Archives series, with the following money quote:

Reasonable debates can be had—should be had—about how aggressively NSA and other intelligence agencies should collect and how long they should retain useless material. But we should have this debate in full knowledge that the problem of incidental collection can never be solved.

Second, another WOTR (w)Archives piece by Stout unravels the comparisons between Snowden and Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg, who's enjoyed a refreshed public podium in the wake of Snowden and Manning's leaks.

Finally, Benjamin Wittes at the Lawfare Blog analyzes the latest round of Snowden links. Wittes' money quote:

Finally, I want to say a word here about the ethics of this leak. Snowden here did not leak programmatic information about government activity. He leaked many tens of thousands of personal communications of a type that, in government hands, are rightly subject to strict controls. They are subject to strict controls precisely so that the woman in lingerie, the kid beaming before a mosque, the men showing off their physiques, and the woman whose love letters have to be collected because her boyfriend is off looking to join the Taliban don’t have to pay an unnecessarily high privacy price. Yes, the Post has kept personal identifying details from the public, and that is laudable. But Snowden did not keep personal identifying details from the Post. He basically outed thousands of people—innocent and not—and left them to the tender mercies of journalists. This is itself a huge civil liberties violation. And we should talk about it as such. I suspect, alas, that we won’t.

One of my former instructors used to refer to this as the "Vacuum Cleaner Problem": in the course of "hoovering up" all of the bits that add up to actionable intelligence, the intelligence practitioner will necessarily "hoover up" a lot of information that's incidental and irrelevant. Thus far, the NSA has done a fairly good job of protecting that data so that people who may have ancillary connections to terrorists don't find their lives disrupted. The same can't be said for Edward Snowden, whose conduct from the outset has been far less conscientious.