Slobberknockered

Edward J. Snowden must be pleased with what he started. A group appointed by President Barack Obama in August to review the National Security Agency’s hugely controversial spying operations has finished its work. Expectations for the panel have been extremely low since its creation. According to administration and congressional officials I spoke with over the past three weeks, senior leaders of the U.S. intelligence community, and especially the NSA, were supremely confident back in August that their support in the White House was rock-solid and that any changes the panel might propose would be, in the words of one official, “largely cosmetic.” Clearly, they were overconfident. The Review Group’s preliminary findings and recommendations are anything but cosmetic.