In the span of three years, the United States has developed two gaping holes in its national security hull, punctures caused by leakers who worked at the lowest levels of the nation's intelligence ranks but gained access to large caches of classified material.
The parallels between Edward Snowden, who has declared himself the source of leaks about National Security Agency surveillance programs, and Bradley Manning, a U.S. Army private on trial for sending hundreds of thousands of secret files to the WikiLeaks whistle-blower website, go beyond generational ties.
Both had enlisted in the army at the outset of the war in Iraq only to later say they were disillusioned by that conflict. Neither has a college degree or extensive academic training in computer science. And yet both were technically savvy, able to navigate sensitive computer networks and smuggle classified files.