An Allegory of the Hill

I n his farewell address to the nation, President Eisenhower told Americans that the military–industrial complex offered enormous potential for abuse if not properly constrained. The problem has become much larger than he imagined. We now have a selfsustaining and self-regulating national militaryindustrial-surveillance-politicalmedia-prison-energy-academicreligious-medical-legal-think-tank complex that is—taken together— too big to control. I’ll return to this point at the end of this column. When a country as technologically advanced as the United States becomes the object of global ridicule for its bungled attempt to cover up flagrant abuses of civil liberties— especially in cyberspace—something is very wrong. There’s a reason why Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping have remained silent about the spate of Snowden flurries—they’re laughing too hard at our ineptitude. I’m going to advance the thesis that the heart of the problem is a self-defeating leadership selection process. The intelligence community itself isn’t the problem: it’s the way we select the leadership that’s the problem.