Happily, the latest Snowden leak has finally convinced Wittes, who is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, that the NSA's collection of the private communications of innocent people constitutes a massive violation of civil liberties—this after insisting for so many months that the NSA and its contractors had perpetrated no serious abuses.

Wittes and I happen to disagree about which acts by current or former NSA employees and contractors are most egregious.But now that we both agree serious abuses have occurred perhaps we can work on reforms.

"NSA has an elaborate set of procedures and compliance mechanisms designed to ensure that the data it collects are not misused by its personnel—procedures which clearly failed in this case," Wittes writes. Slowly but surely, he's moving toward this insight: The NSA's existing mechanisms are woefully inadequate, but no procedures, however elaborate, can adequately safeguard a government database containing the intimate secrets of millions of innocents. Keeping one for years on end is hubristic folly. Horrible violations are inevitable.

The national-security officials who say otherwise are the same people who saw neither Chelsea Manning nor Snowden coming. For all they know, the Chinese have already obtained the intimate communications of various American CEOs from non-whistleblower thieves who go about their business more quietly. In Snowden's case, even after he copied these sensitive communications onto a hard drive, government officials either had no idea what he took or misled us into thinking that he couldn't have accessed what the Post reported. Do you think they'd tell us about a more serious breach?

I'll never see the world like Wittes. After a year of revelations about global mass surveillance on a scale unprecedented in history, it is astonishing to see a commentator who directs his most scathing invective about privacy violations at Snowden:

Ultimately, if you’re not outraged by what Snowden did here, it’s because you’re applying a certain situational ethics. It’s because the privacy of that woman in Australia—and though Gellman delicately kept her name out of the story, her whole social world will know who she is—just doesn’t matter very much compared to the need to expose NSA activities. If you’re okay with dumping in the lap of a journalist 160,000 of the most personal conversations a signals intelligence agency can collect, then stop whining to me about “bulk” or “mass” collection. And if you’re okay with Snowden—in the unfettered exercise of his unlimited discretion—choosing Gellman as the sole check and balance on the disclosure of personal data—Gellman who, unlike NSA, has no statutory standard to live up to and no oversight from Congress or the courts—then stop telling me this is about the rule of law. Because you don’t really mean it.

Much as I understand why Snowden leaked that Australian woman's email, it does make me uncomfortable. I'm even more uncomfortable with an agency that feels justified in seizing, searching and storing the intimate communications of countless millions, the vast majority of them innocent, to perhaps make me infinitesimally safer from a terrorist threat statistically less likely to kill me than lightning.