NATIONAL SECURITY’S MILLENNIAL PROBLEM. “What ties Winner, Snowden and Manning together is their belief that laws on protecting classified information didn’t apply to them. Some sort of imaginary public ‘need to know’ what they learned through their jobs motivated them to leak secrets—with themselves as the sole arbiters of what the public should find out. . . . There’s plenty of blame to go around in the Winner, Snowden, and Manning cases, above all on a failed counterintelligence system that granted high-level security clearances to people who were clearly psychologically unfit to hold them. Yet that does not absolve the criminals here, and it’s impossible to miss that they’re all Millennials too. . . . The Millennial generation, or at least a portion of it, includes Americans who seemingly reject centuries of understanding about why state secrets must be kept. Blame ought not be placed entirely on such Millennials, who after all were raised to reject many of our nation’s core values.”

Well, there are leakers and there are whistleblowers. The former are dangerous, but the latter are the only reason the national security establishment might possibly be trustworthy. I wrote on this a while back.