Why are we analyzing this? Why aren't we telling our representatives that this is wrong & it must stop?
peace
I helped Demand Progress build a website to promote a fix, the Email Privacy Act. The act actually has 310 cosponsors, which is more than any other bill in the House! The website goes into greater detail: https://savethefourth.net/
We have to choose our battles, and I think this is a good one. By the way, please feel free to send a PR / issue on GitHub: https://github.com/demand-progress/ecpa-www
What this says to me is that people at his level in the CIA and NSA, etc at the time and probably still are trading classified information to friendly governments and large corporate clients. What the CIA didn't expect was that Ames was so utterly stupid as to be selling information to the Soviets instead of say the French Government, or the someone at a hedge fund, or a VP of sales at Boeing.
Nobody is worried about this. We think that companies have the right to keep dossiers on people, as long as they make a scout's promise that it's only for advertising. And selling to each other. But don't give data to the government, that would be unethical.