Although history has demonstrated time and again that from government agencies rolling disclosure is always a dimwitted strategy, the NSA--our top intelligence organ!--has chosen to pursue just that in revealing Ed Snowden's emailed red flags. In an interview with the Washington Post, Snowden sticks it to the NSA but good.
The NSA’s new discovery of written contact between me and its lawyers--after more than a year of denying any such contact existed--raises serious concerns. It reveals as false the NSA’s claim to Barton Gellman of the Washington Post in December of last year, that "after extensive investigation ... we have not found any evidence to support Mr. Snowden’s contention that he brought these matters to anyone’s attention."
Today’s release is incomplete, and does not include my correspondence with the Signals Intelligence Directorate’s Office of Compliance, which believed that a classified executive order could take precedence over an act of Congress, contradicting what was just published. It also did not include concerns about how indefensible collection activities ... are sometimes concealed under E.O. 12333 to avoid Congressional reporting requirements and regulations.
One is reminded of that most famous debating tactic, "Please proceed, Governor," whose frolicking antecedent actually came 52 years earlier--and from a Russian premier, not a U.S. president. After we "lost" Francis Gary Powers' U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union in 1960, our government began a laughable rolling-disclosure campaign that for some time was met by Nikita Khrushchev's figurative invitation to "please proceed." President Eisenhower had been assured that the downed U-2 plane's collected surveillance and the pilot himself would have been unrecoverable and dead, in that conceptual order. Khrushchev, however, unknown to Eisenhower, possessed both--the surveillance and a very alive CIA pilot. In one of his rare foreign-policy blunders, Eisenhower persisted in a bumbling campaign of disclosing a disingenuous bit here and a dishonest bit there, which Khrushchev finally and dramatically exposed as a fraud.
He sucked Eisenhower into a major embarrassment, just as Snowden has done to the NSA. And if Snowden has read his history, somewhere he has copies of his "correspondence with the Signals Intelligence Directorate’s Office of Compliance" and that which "include[s] concerns about ... indefensible collection activities." Please proceed, NSAers.