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Comment by grugq | Hacker News Reader

It is incredibly simple politics. He is in place to continue to soak up the bad publicity from the Snowden event. Once the bad publicity stops, he will step down. There is no point, politically, of taking him out right now. His replacement will end up tarnished with the bad PR as he starts his gig.

http://www.constitution.org/mac/prince00.htm

The NSA is unable to do a thorough damage assessment -- they don't know how which documents Snowden took.

Greenwald is drip feeding the world press "stories" which can go on for an indeterminate amount of time (see "no damage assessment").

Only viable option is to keep Clapper in place until Greenwald et al. have exhausted their supply of new scandals.

If, for example, Snowden had gone all Wikileaks and dumped the whole lot of files at once, Clapper would have been gone months ago.

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You are most likely correct.

It seems as though the Intelligence Community is being forced back to 'siloing' since the pooled resource approach seems to be so vulnerable to singleton conscience-ridden whistleblowers. In a way this plays right into Assange's analysis of the cognitive structure of rule by conspiracy in that an organization can know things, but cannot both discuss them internally and keep them secret at the same time. In effect an attack that requires internal barriers to communication to prevent; is also an attack on the organizations overall cognitive ability.

> In effect an attack that requires internal barriers to communication to prevent; is also an attack on the organizations overall cognitive ability.

It is indeed. That was one of the issues noted by the 9/11 Commission formed by Congress, was that the institutional silos prevented the right people from acting on the available intelligence leading up to the 9/11 attack.

Of course NSA had hardly decompartmentalized; Snowden was able to sysadmin himself through many of the compartments, which is a hard enough problem to solve, but that may mean NSA might look and decide they don't need to retract from other IC agencies.

That is the usual way this goes. But we don't yet have the data to determine whether this is what's happening.

The situation may just be an indication that the NSA has joined the old Ma Bell and Italy's Berlusconi in being able to say "we don't care, we don't have to"

That actually makes a lot of sense. At some point he just may get tired of it. How much abuse can one person take.

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