The President and the 'Hacker'

Keith Alexander, the general in charge of the National Security Agency, told ABC News on Sunday that intelligence revelations by fugitive contractor Edward Snowden had "caused irreversible and significant damage to our country and to our allies."

But no worries, President Obama seems to think it's no big deal. "I have not called [Chinese] President Xi personally or [Russian] President Putin personally" about the case, Mr. Obama said on Thursday in Senegal.

And why not? "Number one, I shouldn't have to," Mr. Obama said. "Number two, we've got a whole lot of business that we do with China and Russia, and I'm not going to have one case of a suspect who we're trying to extradite suddenly being elevated to the point where I've got to start doing wheeling and dealing and trading on a whole host of other issues." Oh, and he doesn't want to "be scrambling jets to get a 29-year-old hacker."

That's a revealing answer, and not in a good way. Mr. Obama has invested precious diplomatic capital trying to "reset" relations with Russia and personalize relations with China's leaders, including this month with Mr. Xi in Palm Springs. Hanging with dictators can't be Mr. Obama's idea of a good time, but if there's a point to the exercise it's precisely so he can pick up the phone and intercede with Vlad and Jinping over this kind of issue.

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It's worth wondering whether Mr. Obama didn't make the calls because he feared a personal rebuke, or he wants to downplay the national-security and diplomatic humiliation, or he thinks the Snowden affair is beneath his dignity and best handled by consular officials filling out paperwork—or because he really thinks Gen. Alexander is exaggerating the damage Mr. Snowden has done.

If it's the latter, Mr. Obama could do the public a service by confirming that Mr. Snowden hasn't put the crown jewels of U.S. intelligence in foreign hands. Especially because that's not the view emerging from other government sources.

The Washington Post reports that U.S. analysts fear Mr. Snowden stole much more than he's disclosed. "They think he copied so much stuff—that almost everything that place does, he has," a former government official said.

Several reports quote intelligence sources as saying that al Qaeda and terrorist groups have gained insight into how to avoid NSA detection. The Russian and Chinese intelligence services almost certainly copied whatever Mr. Snowden hauled with him to Hong Kong and Moscow. Nearby on these pages, journalist Edward Jay Epstein connects a few dots and suggests that Mr. Snowden took his consultant job with plans to steal and that he may have had help. In short, there is much more to this debacle than we know so far.

Meantime, Mr. Obama seems to think the only way to force Mr. Snowden's extradition is to make concessions to the Chinese and Russians, rather than demand his return and force Moscow and Beijing to pay a price for failing to comply. Perhaps it's because this Administration rarely seems to exact any price for the misbehavior of other countries that our diplomatic demarches are now treated with such open disdain.

This is why Mr. Snowden remains in a Moscow airport terminal, making demands (via his father) of the terms the U.S. must meet before he returns home. This is also how Russia merrily arms Bashar Assad's forces in Syria, and how Mr. Assad unleashes chemical weapons on his own people, and how Iran marches toward an atomic bomb—all with little concern for what the U.S. might do.

A version of this article appeared June 29, 2013, on page A16 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The President and the 'Hacker'.