For decades intelligence collectors thought they had one job: Steal or gather secrets and hand them off to the president or other officials to give them an advantage. Secrecy was baked into the cake. Now they were being told that secretly collected information might be most useful if it is made public. It was a huge shift. “What,” Nakasone asked me rhetorically, “are the cultural implications of a place like NSA releasing information like that? You can imagine that there are people who have spent their livelihood collecting this information.” This was the first time they were being
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