#keithalexander

When you did something wrong and are caught, you need flowers - or a good excuse. The NSA and its employees provided us with many of the latter. Here's a round-up of our favorite excuses:

1. In early January, Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont sent a concerned letter to NSA director Keith Alexander, asking if the agency had ever spied "on members of Congress or other American elected officials." 

The answer he got eleven days later must have appeared to him more like a joke than a sincere reply. Alexander wrote, "NSA can query the metadata only based on phone numbers reasonably suspected to be associated with specific foreign terrorist groups. For that reason, NSA cannot lawfully search to determine if any records NSA has received under the program have included metadata of the phone calls of any member of Congress, other American elected officials, or any other American without the predicate.”

2. More transparency would certainly help to avoid other privacy intrusions of spy agencies in the future, you might think. Wrong - at least according to Robert Litt, general council for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and Bradford Wiegmann, deputy assistant attorney general.

During a Senate hearing in November 2013 on the proposed Surveillance Transparency Act of 2013, the two testified in a joint written statement, "Attempting to identify the numbers of persons or U.S. persons whose communications or information may be incidentally collected would, in practice, have a privacy-diminishing effect directly contrary to the aims of this bill.” 

This, at the same time, is an excuse for why the NSA can't distinguish between information intercepted from US citizens and non-US citizens. Only in late March, James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, admitted that the NSA used a loophole in the law to "lawfully" acquire information on Americans. 

3. It's all a matter of definition. As we have pointed out in a previous post, during a congressional hearing in March 2013, Senator Ron Wyden from Oregon asked Clapper, "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”

"Not wittingly," Clapper replied. 

The excuse here was a semantic one; the NSA doesn't collect data, because the information it intercepts is processed by computers and not humans. Both Glenn Kessler for the Washington Post and Bruce Schneier for the Defense One section of The Atlantic see this as a contradiction or even lie. 

In June 2013, Clapper admitted in a letter to Congress that "my response was clearly erroneous."

4. In case you missed this groundbreaking revelation: A small number of NSA employees used their data access privileges to spy on love interests. The activities are known as LOVEINT, a label that stands for love intelligence. 

Last night HBO’s new series Last Week With John Oliver debuted, and Oliver’s first guest was recently retired General Keith Alexander – former director of the National Security Agency.

  Mr. Oliver was visibly delighted as he needled Gen. Alexander about his former agency’s program of collecting metadata on all Americans’ phone calls. The general insisted that the program was essential for national security, but that didn’t stop Oliver from politely mocking nearly every point Alexander raised.

  At the top of the segment, Oliver went after the NSA right away, citing a recent policy change by intelligence chief James Clapper – Gen. Alexander’s former boss --that seems completely at odds with testimony Clapper gave to Congress this past January.

  Oliver: …back in January, Director Clapper said:

Clapper: the major takeaway for us, certainly for me, from the past several months, is that we must lean in the direction of transparency whenever and wherever we can.

  Oliver: except as we learned earlier this week, after leaning in the direction of transparency, Clapper didn’t so much as lean away as he did run furiously in the opposite direction.

  Narrator: under new rules by the administration and the nation’s intel chief James Clapper, intelligence employees are banned from speaking to journalists about any intelligence-related matter.

  Oliver: well, that’ll restore the American people’s trust. As we all know the first step in rebuilding any relationship is cutting off any all communication.

  See his interview with Gen. Alexander here:

Shane Harris of Foreign Policy has published an extensive profile on NSA Chief Keith Alexander that is bound to turn some heads.

From Foreign Policy:

... Alexander brought many of his future allies down to Fort Belvoir for a tour of his base of operations, a facility known as the Information Dominance Center. It had been designed by a Hollywood set designer to mimic the bridge of the Starship Enterprise from Star Trek, complete with chrome panels, computer stations, a huge TV monitor on the forward wall, and doors that made a "whoosh" sound when they slid open and closed. Lawmakers and other important officials took turns sitting in a leather "captain's chair" in the center of the room and watched as Alexander, a lover of science-fiction movies, showed off his data tools on the big screen.