General Keith Alexander arrives at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing in Washington, June 2013. Photo: Reuters.
At Foreign Policy, Shane Harris writes about leaders within the National Security Agency who “are angry and dispirited by what they see as the White House’s failure to defend the spy agency against criticism of its surveillance programs, according to four people familiar with the NSA chiefs’ thinking.”
Stewart Baker, the NSA’s former general counsel, said he had not discussed the administration’s response to the NSA scandal with officials in government, but that it was the “general perception” that it had been weak. “The President is uncomfortable defending this. Maybe he spends too much time reading blogs on the left,” Baker said. “That’s fatal in cases like this. You have to make the case because nobody else will.”
Reactions on Twitter to this piece are colorful.