Analyst's note:  Our nation's first spy master, George Washington, warned us all as found in a book entitled "George Washington Spymaster:  How the Americans outspied the British and won the Revolutionary War" written by Thomas B. Allen:

"There is nothing more necessary than good Intelligence to frustrate a designing enemy, & nothing that requires greater pains to obtain."

"There can be scarcely any need of recommending the greatest Caution and secrecy in a Business so critical and dangerous."

"Back in the darkest of days in 1776, Washington had written. "There is one evil I dread, and that is, their spies."  Out of that dread had come George Washington, spymaster.  He built and ran an intelligence operations that helped him outwit his foe and win the war."

We had better be VERY careful playing politics in this arena as, not unlike in the days of George Washington, we have known enemies (foreign and domestic) operating within our midst.  In God we trust, all others we check.  We have spies for a reason .... something to do with espionage by our enemies (foreign and domestic) and thus maintaining our national security.  I don't recall ever reading anything about an Obama technique about "leading from behind."  I also recommend a careful review of JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Is pervasive NSA surveillance & hacking part of a broader conspiracy?

America is necessarily forced to operate in the shadowy world of double agents and covert operations, of codes and ciphers, cell phones & tweets as well as FaceBook, etc., etc. – a world so secret that even the spymaster himself doesn't know the identities of some of his agents. One of those such organizations is our National Security Agency (NSA). Some Americans want more thinking, talking and understanding about how to protect our nation against the global Islamist jihadist threat.  Well kind of ...  until our federal government, under one Barack Hussein Obama, stopped using such words in order not to offend our Islamist enemy.  We must continue to concentrate on what we know the enemy (both foreign and domestic) is capable of and less on what we think he is planning. This will help stop our consistently underestimating enemy offensive capabilities, and reduce our national vulnerability to a masterful deception.

That domestic enemy of which I speak has embedded itself in our governments, universities and other elements of national infrastructure.  They presently call themselves "progressives" (socialist/Marxists) and have aligned themselves with the one-worlder's and Islamist in order to bring America to her knees.  This "domestic enemy" is found operating and headquartered domestically in Washington, D.C.

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Clapper declassifies more spying docs after Obama speech

"Just hours after President Obama laid out changes on Friday to the nation's surveillance practices, his administration released more once-secret national security documents -- this time on the origins and approval of the controversial bulk telephone-data-collection program.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said he released the documents in response to Obama's directive to declassify and make public as much information as possible about the government's sensitive surveillance program over the last six months. The documents can be found on the Office of the DNI's website. [....]"

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Your USB cable, the spy: Inside the NSA’s catalog of surveillance magic

"The National Security Agency’s sophisticated hacking operations go way beyond using software vulnerabilities to gain access to targeted systems. The agency has a catalog of tools available that would make James Bond’s Q jealous, providing NSA analysts access to just about every potential source of data about a target.

In some cases, the NSA has modified the firmware of computers and network hardware—including systems shipped by Cisco, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Huawei, and Juniper Networks—to give its operators both eyes and ears inside the offices the agency has targeted. In others, the NSA has crafted custom BIOS exploits that can survive even the reinstallation of operating systems. And in still others, the NSA has built and deployed its own USB cables at target locations—complete with spy hardware and radio transceiver packed inside.

Documents obtained by Der Spiegel reveal a fantastical collection of surveillance tools dating back to 2007 and 2008 that gave the NSA the power to collect all sorts of data over long periods of time without detection. The tools, ranging from back doors installed in computer network firmware and software to passively powered bugs installed within equipment, give the NSA a persistent ability to monitor some targets with little risk of detection. While the systems targeted by some of the “products” listed in the documents are over five years old and are likely to have been replaced in some cases, the methods and technologies used by all the exploit products could easily still be in use in some form in ongoing NSA surveillance operations.

[....] Old tricks, new tricks

It’s important to note that the exploits in the documents are largely over five years old, so they don’t necessarily give a complete picture of what the NSA is capable of today. That doesn’t mean that these techniques are no longer in circulation—given the stubbornness of Windows XP, many of the exploits developed for older Windows platforms may have years left in them, and some of the adversaries the NSA is trying to monitor don’t have Fortune 500 hardware refresh rates.

A frequent defense of what the NSA does with its bag of tricks is that in many ways it is no different from what other countries (including China, Russia, and France) try to do to the United States and other countries via their intelligence organizations. These documents show the key way the NSA is different—its vast technical resources and ability to essentially put itself into the supply chain for technology flowing to the rest of the world. US officials have long suspected China of doing the same thing with hardware from companies such as Huawei and ZTE, but these documents essentially spell out that "interdiction" is part of the US intelligence strategy, too.

The exposure of the techniques and capabilities of the NSA creates another problem for the agency, in that it provides those hard-to-get-at organizations the TAO was created to go after with an idea of how the NSA has targeted and will target them. It also creates a problem for companies like Cisco and Juniper, who now face the same sort of scrutiny the US and others put Huawei under for its connections to the Chinese military. Even if Dell, HP, Cisco, and Juniper had no hand in creating the backdoors for their products, the documents will undoubtedly be used against them the next time they try to sell hardware to a foreign government."

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Obama Fears Arrest and is Running Scared From NSA Scandal

Obama is so desperate to brush aside the governments illegal NSA spying activity that he compared it to the actions of patriot Paul Revere.