Watching Edward Snowden is interesting for me. <\/p>\n
In the 1990s, freshly graduated from a top liberal arts college, I found myself in a job with a Top Secret security clearance. I would have loved to brag to my former classmates and the rest of the world about my newly won privilege of poring over state secrets. But in one of the more stifling parts of the job, we were sworn to keep the work to ourselves. <\/p>\n
I thought about this recently while watching \"Citizenfour,\" Laura Poitras' fawning Snowden documentary sure to earn an Oscar nomination next month. The documentary leaves out how Snowden bristles at the title of \"low-level systems analyst\" that he was given by the government he betrayed. Reflexively (and pompously) he continually cites in other interviews the \"undercover and overseas\" work he claims to have done not for one but for three spy agencies, including the CIA. <\/p>\n
I can sort of relate: I remember taking umbrage when someone passed me off as a bureaucrat. <\/p>\n
But Snowden exhibits a strain of narcissism common among people in the intelligence community clinging to the mystique that comes with the title of intelligence analyst. \"Spies\" desperately also want to live public lives. The urge to tell all is usually kept in check by the threat of imprisonment, the potential destruction of one's family over spilled secrets or simple worry of losing a secure job a concern that looms large among this group of federal workers with nontransferable experience. <\/p>\n
Most analysts' circumspection, however, is rooted in an admission, deep down in places we didn't like to talk about, that the work of the individual spy does very little to safeguard the nation. <\/p>\n
At college reunions, and even with our own families, those of us in the \"futures\" intelligence game anyway found clever ways to boast while concealing we were tilting at windmills between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the totally unpredicted fall of the World Trade Center towers. <\/p>\n
Forecasting what military capabilities hostile nations might have in 20 years was the mandate for futures intelligence in 1995, when I was in the business. America needed to build the machinery of war not to counter what menacing devices the world already had but what it was likely to face by some milestone date: 2015 was the magical year. <\/p>\n
For a 20-something with inflated notions of safeguarding democracy, my security clearances were keys to imagining the next big threat to the United States after the Cold War. Top Secret \"Special Compartmented Information,\" while detailed and in some cases hard-won by sources in the field, was in the end of very little help, or worse, sent the defense industry down the wrong path of readying power to meet threats we mis-imagined. <\/p>\n
Twenty years ago there were more than 600 submarines in the inventories of more than 40 nations, some of them belonging to \"rogue\" nations such as Libya and Iran. It was only a footnote that many were rusting in port. The Defense Department's impressive-sounding Quadrennial Defense Review of 1996, the first review requested by Congress since the collapse of the Soviet Union, coursed through the Pentagon's inner rings with a tired tallying of global military assets, particularly in East Asia. <\/p>\n
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