The administration has released a heavily redacted opinion of the FISA court (FISC) from 2011 that found some of the NSA’s activities to be unconstitutional. In part, this is in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, but it’s primarily aimed at countering the idea that the FISC is a toothless rubber stamp.
In that effort, the administration has been only partially successful. It’s true that they’ve demonstrated that the FISC is willing and able to stop practices that intrude on our right to privacy, but they had to admit that our privacy had been violated in order to do it, and the hostile newspaper headlines emphasize the latter point rather than the former. That’s a news management problem, but the bigger concern is that the court ruling expressed dissatisfaction with the candor of the Intelligence Community, as well as the court’s ability to conduct adequate oversight.
If the idea is that the FISC is not toothless, we may be satisfied to a small degree but we now know that it is in need of substantial dental work.
As a result, this welcome gesture at transparency does little to mitigate the sting of seeing Bradley Manning sentenced to 35 years in prison. That Manning earned himself some jail time is beyond legitimate dispute, but the proportional disparity between his punishment and the punishment received by people whose crimes Manning revealed is impossible to reconcile. Assuming some period of good behavior, Manning’s sentence should be substantially reduced.
Edward Snowden is a more complicated case. It’s easy to make the argument that his leaks have made these revelations possible and therefore argue that he deserves complete whistleblower protection. But it is very troubling that he took a job with Booz Allen with the express purpose of gathering and leaking classified information, and there needs to be a thorough investigation of what he’s been sharing with the Russians (and before them, the Chinese). At this point, we don’t have enough information to know how he should be treated, but there are mitigating factors that should work in his favor.
