CD

No, they certainly haven’t.

I actually had an amazing conversation with a kid at West Point when I was there, who hung back until the end of my book signing — because they have a book store there.

I did my lecture, and he came up and shyly but also slightly belligerently said: “You know, I think I want to join the NSA.” I said, “Oh, yes? Why?” He said, “Well, I see my family. They use computers. I agree with everything you’ve said. The way that they use computers exposes them to enormous potential harm. I want to help protect them. That’s the branch of my nation’s military that protects our nation’s cyber infrastructure.”

I said, “Well, what about all the concerns with their illegal activities?” He said, “Well, I think I could do something about that. They need good people working there.”

One of the weird things about talking at West Point is that not all those people have clearance, so they’re not allowed to read the Snowden leaks. It’s illegal for government employees to traffic in classified documents. Those documents remain classified, even though they’re in the public domain. They can’t even read the New York Times on days when they’re publishing the Snowden materials. So I know more about what’s in the Snowden leaks than they do.

I said, “Look, I know you haven’t read the Snowden leaks, but Vanity Fair profiled him. You should read the profile. You should read his story because not only is he multigenerational military family, but he was the best and the brightest of the CIA, he was an undercover agent in Switzerland for the CIA, and he was their top IT guy at Booz, but he walked around with a copy of the Bill of Rights in booklet form in his back pocket and spent every hour of every day trying to talk to his colleagues about the legality of what was going on.

He went all the way up the chain of command over and over and over again, and after years of this, concluded that facing a firing squad was the only means by which he could redress what he had discovered inside the NSA.”

So I said to this kid: “You need to ask yourself, what is it that you’re going to do change the culture of the NSA that Snowden couldn’t?”