The CIA is out of control. Is there any other conclusion after last week’s scandal? “CIA officers improperly accessed Senate computers, read the emails of Senate staff, and exhibited a lack of candor when interviewed by agency investigators,” the Associated Press reported. “The agency officers searched Senate computers without permission for information gathered in the course of a Senate investigation into the CIA’s interrogation techniques.”

This is dangerous stuff.

The Senate intelligence committee is the primary congressional overseer of America’s foreign spy agency. When entitled CIA bureaucrats spy on the very people meant to keep them in check, they attack the Constitution’s core genius: our system’s separation of powers, which Lynne Cheney described so glowingly in her recent book on founder James Madison.

If a foreign spy agency were behaving this way, the U.S. State Department would put out a statement of concern about a Third World country unable to control its national security state. But when it happens here, the news is greeted with a yawn by too many Americans, in part because it’s hard for us to imagine that our system has really grown so alarmingly dysfunctional.

Alas, it has.

Weeks ago, the director of the CIA, John Brennan, self-righteously proclaimed that the intelligence agency hadn’t spied on the Senate, criticizing those who levied the accusation. Now that it is proven, it isn’t clear if Brennan himself was lying to the Senate, or if he was unaware of serious wrongdoing by bureaucrats who are under his supervision.

Either way, he failed as a leader.

Unsurprisingly, at least three members of the U.S. Senate, including a Republican and two Democrats, are calling for him to be fired or resign his post. But President Barack Obama, who appointed him, has reacted to this controversy by reiterating his praise for the embattled Brennan.

For that reason, Obama is failing as a leader too.

While Brennan has apologized for the behavior of his underlings, there is the very real possibility that no one will be punished for it. Law professor Glenn Reynolds has aptly explained why that is problematic in an essay positing that, at worst, Director Brennan will resign and collect a huge paycheck elsewhere. “Without consequences, why should we expect better behavior in the future?” he asked. “People respond to incentives: If spying on, and lying to, Congress is dangerous, and the results of being caught unpleasant, then there will be less of it. If, on the other hand, the worst risk is a slap on the wrist and a seven-figure career in the private sector, then I suspect we’ll see more of this kind of bad behavior.”

It’s increasingly looking like not even the resignation will happen. (And almost no one is ever “fired” in Washington, D.C. They just suddenly declare a desire “to spend more time with my family,” itself a sign of a system averse to holding anyone accountable for messing up.)

A system that punishes wrongdoing by national security officials sometimes seems beyond the realm of possibility, but accountability could actually increase rather quickly if voters cared more about it. Even a few hundred letter to senators and congressional representatives would go a long way if all of them thoughtfully demanded steps to discipline CIA misbehavior. But Democrats typically defer to whatever position Obama happens to have taken, while Republicans too often invest irrational trust in agencies that fight the War on Terrorism, as if those bureaucrats are somehow less prone to bad behavior.

The CIA is certainly necessary. Its employees often act bravely, even heroically. But power and secrecy both fuel corruption. The CIA needs independent, empowered overseers even more than most other government agencies (which aren’t exactly paragons of civic virtue). Indeed, the CIA performs its counterterrorism mission best when its shortcomings are readily identifiable to Senate critics, so that flaws can be reformed and performance improved.

Anything less weakens our national security and our democracy.

Staff opinion columnist Conor Friedersdorf also is a staff writer for the Atlantic.