By Jack Strayer, Speaking from Experience

We have recently learned what official Washington has known for years.
The USA Patriot Act of 2001 secretly created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board.
These two ultra-secret organizations work to protect the citizens of the United States from foreign terrorists, while protecting the constitutional rights of all Americans.
From what I can tell, the National Security Agency (NSA), using all sorts of Internet search engines, cell phone servers and social media sites, detects the chatter of menacing forces intent on destroying America.
When the NSA tracks down the sources of this threatening chatter, they contact the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to get permission to go after the terrorists before they can wreak havoc on us.
Then, as far as I can tell, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board decides if the surveillance court has enough evidence to find the bad guys and then the NSA stops them in their tracks by sending out the drones to zap the terrorists into oblivion.
According to the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, this eavesdropping infrastructure works well and has thwarted major attacks on our national security at least a dozen times.
That’s the good news.
The bad news is that privacy in the United States doesn’t really exist anymore. Our phone calls, e-mails, tweets and electronic posting are all scrutinized.
The confidential sources of the free press are identified and tracked by the FBI. Security cameras film us all the time.
But this loss of privacy seems to be nothing more than collateral damage because it has finally brought bipartisanship back to the U.S. Congress. And so we have gone full circle back to good news.
Sort of.
Whenever you have an infrastructure like this that is complicated and ultra-secret, things fall through the intelligence system’s cracks. And as we all know, cracks cause leaks, and it’s the leaks that cause political chaos.
The guy that apparently leaked all this secret stuff, Edward Snowden, has fallen through the world-wide surveillance cracks and may leak even more really bad information that may ruin the political careers of many well-meaning people in Washington.
It is therefore safe to assume that the drones are already on their way to plug the leak, if you know what I mean.