The lesson of the Merkel affair was that the NSA, in its single-minded passion to pick up every bit of foreign intelligence that it could, failed to consider the damage that might be done if its activities ever became public. No one was reviewing its target list to see if it passed the simple test applied to covert actions at the CIA: if this operation was splashed across the front pages of the Times and the Post, would someone have to resign in disgrace? In fact, a senior Obama national-security official told me that while the CIA’s covert actions were reviewed every year, no one had done the
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