Obama Appears to Be Losing the War on Leaks

They're springing up everywhere

If there's one early takeaway from this week's bombshell revelations about government agencies spying on American citizens, it's that President Obama's aggressive, years-long war on leaks and whistleblowers has been a failure.

Despite his administration's going to unprecedented lengths to crack down on national security leaks — from seizing the phone records of media organizations to discover their sources, to charging alleged WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning with aiding the enemy — this week has seen two of the most significant leaks in more than a decade.

On Wednesday The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald revealed that the NSA was collecting phone records for millions of Verizon customers, after someone provided the paper with a top secret court order. Then on Thursday, a "career intelligence officer" leaked another top secret document to the Washington Post proving the existence of an expansive NSA program called PRISM that spies on Americans through nine major internet companies.