Edward Snowden’s appearances through video teleconferences and on TV have lent him an air of impermanence and mystery. His name remains a buzzword; his appearances and commentary via tenuous Internet connection generate publicity on a scale rarely seen. His interviewers ask him about an upbringing that led him to his defection from the intelligence ranks, how deep the rabbit hole really goes, how he feels about being separated from his loved ones, his thoughts on the Constitution, our rights, and a myriad of other things that all unite to imply he’s a patiot or a traitor, but never truly both.

Edward Snowden. A product of 9/11, a nobody drawn to patriotic service. Apprentice spy and contractor working for team Cheney, in some ways everything about a generation of mindless and detached worker bees that the east coast elite hates. But before he was a patriot, before he was this century’s most beloved and reviled American citizen, he was just a man with a job. Just like thousands of other contractors that continue to work under the aegis of Booz Allen Hamilton and Northrop-Grumman.

Almost two years after Edward Snowden climbed the world stage, the intelligence community is just now putting the finishing touches on a computer-driven system for catching insider threats– one that promises not just to detect future Snowdens and Mannings in the act, but also to predict who the next leakers will be.

Everyone saw the USS Annapolis come home last year. It returned, poignantly, on Sept. 11, and there was a seriousness amid the usual dockside fanfare—sailors meeting newborn children for the first time, a school band playing "Anchors Aweigh." But there was no mention of the boat's secret missions.

You'd think that with all of the problems in the Middle East, thousands of Russian nuclear weapons pointed at us, and over a billion Chinese people, the most prevalent language specialty in the U.S. intelligence community would be Arabic or Russian or Chinese. But a birdie recently told me that it is Spanish. Not Spanish because there are so many Spanish-speaking Americans (10 percent of the U.S. population, or more than 37 million), but intelligence quality Spanish, that's intended for a special world. Linguists and translators and liaison officers are needed not only to wage war against narcoterrorism, apparently, but also for that big contingency when Mexico becomes the next ungoverned pin on the geostrategist's map.