U.S. Spy Chief Denies Intelligence Failure on Boston Bombing

Only so much they can do in a free(ish) country

Congressmen are already lining up to label the Boston Marathon bombing as yet another failure of the U.S. intelligence community. The head of America's 16 spy agencies has a response for the Capitol Hill critics: back off.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper urged Americans today "not to hyperventilate for a while before we get all the facts." In his most substantial public comments on the Boston attacks to date, provided at a suburban Washington intelligence conference, Clapper warned that finding the bombers in advance would require an invasion of Americans' privacy by the government that citizens would likely find intolerable.

"The rules were abided by, as best as I can tell at this point," he said at the confab, called the 12th Annual C4ISR Journal Conference. "The dots were connected."