A half decade after the Snowden revelations, it is remarkable how many questions the NSA was never forced to answer in public. Its officials were able to hide behind the secrecy that surrounds its operations, even though the Snowden trove gave the world an unparalleled look at their work. Publicly, the intelligence agency leadership treated the entire Snowden insider leak as equivalent to a natural disaster: something you regretted but couldn’t do anything about.
