Hey, NSA, Get Off of My Cloud

Every week seems to bring another revelation about the National Security Agency’s global panopticon. And each disclosure makes it harder to extend the agency the kind of trust and latitude that good intelligence work requires.

The latest leak is a whopper. According to documents former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden provided to the Washington Post, the NSA has infiltrated the overseas “cloud” networks through which Yahoo Inc. and Google Inc. move their petabytes of data, which includes users’ e-mail. Because the collection is conducted abroad, it’s subject to less oversight than the agency’s previously revealed programs are. The intrusion is all the more curious because the NSA can already access both companies’ accounts under U.S. court supervision.