Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, said the NSA should have an internal affairs unit, much as most police departments have in the U.S. “A unit whose job it is to watch the cops about being bribed, being corrupted, stepping out of their lane,” he said. “Where you have watchers watching the watchers.”

Attorneys who specialize in candidates for high-level government security clearance tend to agree. Greg Rinckey, managing partner of Tully Rinckey PLLC, proposed the need for internal “counterintelligence.” A body devoted to seeking out the soft spots of federal employees (“Can they be blackmailed? How might they become disillusioned?”) before they can gain access to reams of confidential information could prevent future leaks, he said. Hundreds of thousands of contractors like Snowden enjoy top-secret status and few choose his path, Rinckey added, but “everybody has a weakness.”

The biggest threat to U.S. intelligence these days isn’t so much Russian spies, Graham said, but disaffected young men like Snowden; Private Bradley Manning, who is accused of being behind Wikileaks; and Aaron Swartz, the activist founder of social news site reddit who committed suicide after the government brought him up on charges of wire and computer fraud for illegally downloading millions of documents. “I think that there’s a group of people, younger people who are not fighting the war, who are libertarians mostly, who feel like the government is the problem,” Graham said, “that those who are trained to defend us are a bigger threat than those who are trying to attack us.”