It is the nature of bureaucracies to expand and accumulate prerogatives. The National Security Agency, a dusty post-World War II institution of routine habits and outdated technology, focused on the remnants of the Soviet Union and its East European satellites, did not waste an opportunity when the 9/11 attacks occurred in New York and Washington.

Money, recruits and tasks poured in. War on Terror was declared. The money that flowed to the American intelligence agencies benefitted NSA more than any other non-Pentagon service. NSA, a bureaucracy in need, had no hesitation about boosting itself. The Snowden papers recount its pride in a 2007 letter of commendation the agency received for electronically locating a sniper inside the Green Zone in Baghdad. That's what Global Surveillance was all about in those days.

Early in November of this year, The New York Times quoted an agency boast that when Ban Ki-moon, the U.N. secretary general, visited President Barack Obama at the White House last April, the president found before him a secretly intercepted copy of the U.N. head's talking points (as if Obama might not have guessed what they would be). The agency on its internal broadsheet listed this as the week's "operational highlight."