In a 1995 executive order, President Bill Clinton declared that “No inference concerning standards [for government employment] may be raised solely on the basis of the sexual orientation of the employee.” Leading up to the decision, the Central Intelligence Agency and other agencies had a long history of discrimination against gay employees, viewing their homosexuality as a gateway to blackmail, extortion, and treason.

In the late ’60s and early ’70s, Senator Sam Ervin was working determinedly to get a Federal Employee’s Bill of Rights passed through Congress. The Central Intelligence Agency identified several areas of the bill that they felt were problematic, including how it would interfere with the Agency’s use of the polygraph as a tool to identify and terminate any “homosexual employees.”

Task Group Six was an interagency working group for members of the National Security Council on the problem of intelligence compromises. As a result of its study, it made a number of recommendations to improve security and reduce the likelihood of insider threats - changing the way the intelligence agencies did business by putting a natural limit on the scope of their activities. If these policies had been pursued, it’s unlikely that Snowden would have had the justification or the ability to leak the materials he did. Instead, the recommendations that would have seen an actual shift in the status quo were ignored.