Snowden

Three Years Later: How Snowden Helped the U.S. Intelligence Community

Snowden forced the intelligence community out of its suboptimal and unsustainable obsession with secrecy.  “Before the unauthorized disclosures, we were always conservative about discussing specifics of our collection programs, based on the truism that the more adversaries know about what we're doing, the more they can avoid our surveillance,” Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said in 2013.   Post-Snowden, the intelligence community operates on the principle that secrecy is not an absolute value, but one that needs to be traded off for other values, including domestic legitimacy.  Snowden made it realize that, in the words of former NSA Director Michael Hayden, “although the public cannot be briefed on everything, there has to be enough out there so that the majority of the population believe what they are doing is acceptable.”