It's been a tough year for the agency tasked with monitoring internal dissent.

First was the Shadow Brokers leak.



The New York Times, citing current and former agency officials, is reporting that a group called the Shadow Brokers has been targeting the NSA with the tools the agency developed to spy on other countries. North Korean and Russian hackers "picked up" and "shot back at the United States and its allies," the Times reports.

...According to the Times, the 15-month investigation into the NSA by its counterintelligence arm and the FBI still has not led to a clear source of the leaks.

According to the Times, in an effort to identify those in connection with the leaks, some "NSA employees have been subjected to polygraphs and suspended from their jobs." As a result, "morale has plunged."

Ouch! The term "Hoisted by One’s Own Petard’" comes to mind.

Then just the other day, the NSA had a really stupid leak.



A virtual disk image belonging to the NSA -- essentially the contents of a hard drive -- was left exposed on a public Amazon Web Services storage server. The server contained more than 100 gigabytes of data from an Army intelligence project codenamed "Red Disk," ZDNet first reported.

The server was unlisted, but it didn't have a password, which meant that anyone who found it could dig through the government's secret documents.

..."It was as simple as typing in a URL," Vickery said. "This data was top secret classification, as well as files obviously related to US intelligence networks. It's stuff used to target people for death, and it was all available in a URL."

Vickery said it had been so unbelievably easy to access that when he first discovered it, his first thought was, "is this real?"

Well, that's a comforting thought.

So we have a spy agency that can't keep secrets.

In a sane world that agency would be restructured, or simply done away with.

However, this is Washington we are talking about.



Thrown last-minute into a torrent of competing legislation, a new bill meant to expand the NSA’s broad surveillance powers is the most recent threat to American privacy. It increases who is subject to surveillance, allows warrantless search of American communications, expands how collected data can be used, and treats constitutional protections as voluntary.

It seems all that will be required is for an intelligence agency, any intelligence agency, to claim "national security" and they can avoid the constitutional warrant requirement.