National Security: Not Really

Let's just hit the highlight graf from this essay:

...The short, and painful, answer is that Snowden was far from the first bad apple to have “beaten” the [Intelligence Community]’s security clearance system, and he surely won’t be the last. Like so many things across the Federal government, and particularly the Department of Defense (DoD), a great deal of once-critical missions have been outsourced since the 1990’s, leading to gross incompetence and corruption by for-profit companies. (Outsourcing is a fully bipartisan boondoggle that nobody inside the Beltway wants to look into very deeply, since so many cash in on it, one way or the other.) In Snowden’s case, the firm that handled the collection of data for his clearances, USIS, stands accused of fraud on a truly massive scale, having simply faked 665,000 background investigations between 2008 and 2012. It’s little wonder that Snowden’s clearances were handled poorly....

The essay's summary:  it's not "if", it's "when."  And it's not just outsourcing contractors; it's "influential people" in Gummint (read:  politicians) whose ne'er-do-well relatives and/or big-donor's chilluns who are placed in Intel and kept there, regardless of warning signs or conclusive evidence that they should be shot at dawn.

Think a (R) Congress will fix it?

Really?