michael mcconnell

Last year, the Democratic Congress enthusiastically acquiesced to President George W. Bush’s insistence on carving out individualized suspicion and other privacy protections from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The Democrats did so to preempt the charge of being weak on national security from the presidential campaign — didn’t work — and then-Sen. Barack Obama, who [...]

Some instances of government secrecy are genuinely malign, but most are frivolous. The cardinal example there is the intelligence budget. For reasons no one has ever compellingly explained, the annual budget of the 16-agency intelligence community was for decades a guarded secret.
Yes, this is taxpayer money, but the thinking went that if the figure became [...]