Is the NSA Story Coming to an End?

Stewart Baker began this week's Steptoe Cyberlaw Podcast---which always opens with the week's NSA news---by noting that there was virtually no NSA news this week. That which did exist, moreover, was not the result of new Snowden-related leaks but a declassification. It wasn't the first time the pickings have been slim of late. The machine that was, for the better part of a year, grinding out revelation after revelation about U.S. intelligence practices has slowed down to a bare trickle. It's too early to pronounce the NSA story over, but it seems like a good time to ask whether it's ending---or, rather, to ask whether it has reached the phase at which the flood of new information has ebbed and the factual record the story is going to produce is thus more or less complete. That will still leave us with huge questions with which to wrestle. How do we want to reform our laws and practices in light of what we've learned? How do we manage the fallout in our relations with other countries and in the damage done to our industry? What part of what we do in the intelligence sphere are we prepared to change and what part are we prepared to actively defend---and what part are we just going to continue without a great deal of discussion or active defense? In some ways, we have actually been in this phase for a while already. Virtually none of the more recent Snowden revelations have changed the nature of what we had learned---or added materially to it. Those revelations that we are still getting are additive in nature, more of the same, not a difference in kind. The NSA collects a lot of stuff, we learn again and again; it has tremendous capabilities; its constraints are constraints of law and policy more than constraints of ability. But the slowdown in new stories accentuates the point that we have learned what we're going to learn from Snowden and his cache. The rest is choices we have to make.