On Aug. 1, 2005, Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander reported for dutyas the 16th director of the National Security Agency, the United States' largestintelligence organization. He seemed perfect for the job. Alexander was adecorated Army intelligence officer and a West Point graduate with master'sdegrees insystems technology and physics. He had run intelligence operations in combatand had held successive senior-level positions, most recently as the directorof an Army intelligence organization and then as the service's overall chief ofintelligence. He was both a soldier and a spy, and he had the heart of a techgeek. Many of his peers thought Alexander would make a perfect NSA director.But one prominent person thought otherwise: the prior occupant of that office.
Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden had been running the NSA since1999, through the 9/11 terrorist attacks and into a new era that found theglobal eavesdropping agency increasingly focused on Americans' communicationsinside the United States. At times, Hayden had found himself swimming in themurkiest depths of the law, overseeing programs that other senior officials ingovernment thought violated the Constitution. Now Hayden of all people wasworried that Alexander didn't understand the legal sensitivities of that newmission.
"Alexander tended to be a bit of a cowboy: 'Let's notworry about the law. Let's just figure out how to get the job done,'" saysa former intelligence official who has worked with both men. "That causedGeneral Hayden some heartburn."
The heartburn first flared up not long after the 2001terrorist attacks. Alexander was the general in charge of the Army'sIntelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. He beganinsisting that the NSA give him raw, unanalyzed data about suspected terroristsfrom the agency's massive digital cache, according to three former intelligenceofficials. Alexander had been building advanced data-mining software andanalytic tools, and now he wanted to run them against the NSA's intelligencecaches to try to find terrorists who were in the United States or planningattacks on the homeland.
By law, the NSA had to scrub intercepted communications ofmost references to U.S. citizens before those communications can be shared withother agencies. But Alexander wanted the NSA "to bend the pipe towardshim," says one of the former officials, so that he could siphon offmetadata, the digital records of phone calls and email traffic that can be usedto map out a terrorist organization based on its members' communicationspatterns.
"Keith wanted his hands on the raw data. And he bridledat the fact that NSA didn't want to release the information until it was properlyreviewed and in a report," says a former national security official."He felt that from a tactical point of view, that was often too late to beuseful."
Hayden thought Alexander was out of bounds. INSCOM wassupposed to provide battlefield intelligence for troops and special operationsforces overseas, not use raw intelligence to find terrorists within U.S.borders. But Alexander had a more expansive view of what military intelligenceagencies could do under the law.
"He said at one point that a lot of things aren'tclearly legal, but that doesn't make them illegal," says a former militaryintelligence officer who served under Alexander at INSCOM.
In November 2001, the general in charge of all Armyintelligence had informed his personnel, including Alexander, that the militaryhad broad authority to collect and share information about Americans, so longas they were "reasonably believed to be engaged" in terroristactivities, the general wrote in a widelydistributedmemo.
The general didn't say how exactly to make thisdetermination, but it was all the justification Alexander needed."Hayden's attitude was 'Yes, we have the technological capability, butshould we use it?' Keith's was 'We have the capability, so let's use it,'"says the former intelligence official who worked with both men.
Hayden denied Alexander's request for NSA data. And therewas some irony in that decision. At the same time, Hayden was overseeing ahighly classified program to monitor Americans' phone records and Internetcommunications without permission from a court. At least one component of thatsecret domestic spying program would later prompt senior Justice Departmentofficials to threaten resignation because they thought it was illegal.
But that was a presidentially authorized program run by atop-tier national intelligence agency. Alexander was a midlevel general whoseemed to want his own domestic spying operation. Hayden was so troubled thathe reported Alexander to his commanding general, a former colleague says."He didn't use that atomic word -- 'insubordination' -- but he dancedaround it."
The showdown over bending the NSA's pipes was emblematic ofAlexander's approach to intelligence, one he has honed over the course of a39-year military career and deploys today as the director of the country's mostpowerful spy agency.
Alexander wants as much data as he can get. And he wants tohang on to it for as long as he can. To prevent the next terrorist attack, hethinks he needs to be able to see entire networks of communications and also go"backin time,"as he has said publicly, to study how terrorists and their networks evolve. Tofind the needle in the haystack, he needs the entire haystack.
"Alexander's strategy is the same as Google's: I needto get all of the data," says a former administration official who workedwith the general. "If he becomes the repository for all that data, hethinks the resources and authorities will follow."
That strategy has worked well for Alexander. He has servedlonger than any director in the NSA's history, and today he stands atop a U.S.surveillance empire in which signalsintelligence,the agency's specialty, is the coin of the realm. In 2010, he became the firstcommander of the newly created U.S. Cyber Command, making him responsible fordefending military computer networks against spies, hackers, and foreign armedforces -- and for fielding a new generation of cyberwarriors trained topenetrate adversaries' networks. Fueled by a series of relentless andincreasingly revealing leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, thefull scope of Alexander's master plan is coming to light.
Today, the agency is routinely scooping up and storingAmericans' phone records. It is screening their emails and text messages, eventhough the spy agency can't always tell the difference between an innocent American and a foreignterrorist. The NSA uses corporate proxies to monitor up to 75 percent of Internet traffic inside the UnitedStates. And it has spent billions of dollars on a secret campaign to foil encryption technologies that individuals,corporations, and governments around the world had long thought protected theprivacy of their communications from U.S. intelligence agencies.
The NSA was already a data behemothwhen Alexander took over. But under his watch, the breadth, scale, and ambitionof its mission have expanded beyond anything ever contemplated by hispredecessors. In 2007, the NSA began collecting information from Internet andtechnology companies under the so-called PRISM program. In essence, it was apipes-bending operation. The NSA gets access to the companies' rawdata--including e-mails, video chats, and messages sent through socialmedia--and analysts then mine it for clues about terrorists and other foreign intelligencesubjects. Similar to how Alexander wanted the NSA to feed him withintelligence at INSCOM, now some of the world's biggest technologycompanies -- including Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Apple -- are feeding theNSA. But unlike Hayden, the companies cannot refuse Alexander's advances. ThePRISM program operates under a legal regime, put in place a few years afterAlexander arrived at the NSA, that allows the agency to demand broad categoriesof information from technology companies.
Never in history has one agency ofthe U.S. government had the capacity, as well as the legal authority, tocollect and store so much electronic information. Leaked NSA documents show theagency sucking up data from approximately 150 collection sites on sixcontinents. The agency estimates that 1.6 percent of all data on the Internet flowsthrough its systems on a given day -- an amount of information about 50 percent larger than whatGoogle processes in the same period.
When Alexander arrived, the NSA wassecretly investing in experimental databases to store these oceans ofelectronic signals and give analysts access to it all in as close to real timeas possible. Under his direction, it has helped pioneer new methods of massivestorage and retrieval. That has led to a data glut. The agency has collected somuch information that it ran out of storage capacity at its 350-acreheadquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland, outside Washington, D.C. At a cost ofmore than $2 billion, it has built a new processing facility in the Utahdesert, and it recently brokeground on a complex in Maryland. There is a line item in theNSA's budget just for research on "coping with informationoverload."
Yet it's still not enough forAlexander, who has proposed installing the NSA's surveillance equipment on thenetworks of defense contractors, banks, and other organizations deemedessential to the U.S. economy or national security. Never has this intelligenceagency -- whose primary mission is espionage, stealing secrets from othergovernments -- proposed to become the electronic watchman of Americanbusinesses.
This kind of radical expansion shouldn'tcome as a surprise. In fact, it's a hallmark of Alexander's career. During theIraq war, for example, he pioneered a suite of real-time intelligence analysistools that aimed to scoop up every phone call, email, and text message in thecountry in a search for terrorists and insurgents. Military and intelligenceofficials say it provided valuable insights that helped turn the tide of thewar. It was also unprecedented in itsscope and scale. He has transferred that architecture to a global scale now,and with his responsibilities at Cyber Command, he is expanding his writ intothe world of computer network defense and cyber warfare.
As a result, the NSA has never been more powerful, morepervasive, and more politically imperiled. The same philosophy that turnedAlexander into a giant -- acquire as much data from as many sources as possible-- is now threatening to undo him. Alexander today finds himself in the unusualposition of having to publicly defend once-secret programs and reassure Americansthat the growth of his agency, which employs more than35,000 people, is not a cause for alarm. In July, the House of Representativesalmost approved a law to constrain the NSA's authorities -- the closestCongress has come to reining in the agency since the 9/11 attacks. That narrowdefeat for surveillance opponents has set the stage for a Supreme Court ruling on whether metadata -- theinformation Alexander has most often sought about Americans -- should beafforded protection under the FourthAmendment'sprohibition against "unreasonable searches and seizures," which wouldmake metadata harder for the government to acquire.
Alexander declined Foreign Policy's request for aninterview, but in response to questions about his leadership, his respect forcivil liberties, and the Snowden leaks, he provided a written statement.
"The missions of NSA and USCYBERCOMare conducted in a manner that is lawful, appropriate, and effective, and underthe oversight of all three branches of the U.S. government," Alexanderstated. "Our mission is to protect our people and defend the nation withinthe authorities granted by Congress, the courts and the president. Thereis an ongoing investigation into the damage sustained by our nation and ourallies because of the recent unauthorized disclosure of classified material.Based on what we know to date, we believe these disclosures have causedsignificant and irreversible harm to the security of the nation."
In lieu of an interview about hiscareer, Alexander's spokesperson recommended a laudatory profile about him thatappeared in WestPoint magazine. It begins: "At key momentsthroughout its history, the United States has been fortunate to have the rightleader -- someone with an ideal combination of rare talent and strong character-- rise to a position of great responsibility in public service. With GeneralKeith B. Alexander ... Americans are again experiencing this auspicious state ofaffairs."
Lawmakers and the public are increasingly taking a differentview. They are skeptical about what Alexander has been doing with all the datahe's collecting -- and why he's been willing to push the bounds of the law toget it. If he's going to preserve his empire, he'll have to mount the biggestcharm offensive of his career. Fortunately for him, Alexander has spent as muchtime building a political base of power as a technological one.
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Those who know Alexander say he is introspective,self-effacing, and even folksy. He's fond of corny jokes and puns and likes toplay pool, golf, and BejeweledBlitz, theaddictive puzzle game, on which he says he routinely scores more than 1 millionpoints.
Alexander is also as skilled a Washington knife fighter asthey come. To get the NSA job, he allied himself with the Pentagon brass, mostnotably Donald Rumsfeld, who distrusted Hayden and thought he had been tryingto buck the Pentagon's control of the NSA. Alexander also called on all theright committee members on Capitol Hill, the overseers and appropriators whohold the NSA's future in their hands.
When he was running the Army's Intelligence and SecurityCommand, Alexander brought many of his future allies down to Fort Belvoir for atour of his base of operations, a facility known as the Information DominanceCenter. It had been designed by a Hollywood set designer to mimic the bridgeof the starship Enterprise from Star Trek, complete with chrome panels, computerstations, a huge TV monitor on the forward wall, and doors that made a"whoosh" sound when they slid open and closed. Lawmakers and otherimportant officials took turns sitting in a leather "captain'schair"in the center of the room and watched as Alexander, a lover of science-fictionmovies, showed off his data tools on the big screen.
"Everybody wanted to sit in the chair at least once topretend he was Jean-LucPicard,"says a retired officer in charge of VIP visits.
Alexander wowed members of Congress with his eye-poppingcommand center. And he took time to sit with them in their offices and explainthe intricacies of modern technology in simple, plain-spoken language. Hedemonstrated a command of the subject without intimidating those who had none.
"Alexander is 10 times the political general as DavidPetraeus," says the former administration official, comparing the NSAdirector to a man who was once considered a White House contender. "Hecould charm the paint off a wall."
Alexander has had to muster every ounce of that politicalsavvy since the Snowden leaks started coming in June. In closed-door briefings,members of Congress have accused him of deceiving them about how muchinformation he has been collecting on Americans. Even when lawmakers havescreamed at him from across the table, Alexander has remained"unflappable," says a congressional staffer who has sat in onnumerous private briefings since the Snowden leaks. Instead of screaming back,he reminds lawmakers about all theterrorism plots that the NSA has claimed to help foil.
"He is well aware that he will be criticized if there'sanother attack," the staffer says. "He has said many times, 'My jobis to protect the American people. And I have to be perfect.'"
There's an implied threat in that statement. If Alexanderdoesn't get all the information he wants, he cannot do his job. "He neversays it explicitly, but the message is, 'You don't want to be the one to makeme miss,'" says the former administration official. "You don't wantto be the one that denied me these capabilities before the next attack."
Alexander has a distinct advantage over most, if not all,intelligence chiefs in the government today: He actually understands themultibillion-dollar technical systems that he's running.
"When he would talk to our engineers, he would get downin the weeds as far as they were. And he'd understand what they were talkingabout," says a former NSA official. In that respect, he had a leg up onHayden, who colleagues say is a good big-picture thinker but lacks the geekgene that Alexander was apparently born with.
"He looked at the technicalaspects of the agency more so than any director I've known," says Richard"Dickie" George, who spent 41 years at the NSA and retired as thetechnical director of the Information Assurance Directorate. "I get theimpression he would have been happy being one of those guys working down in thenoise," George said, referring to the front-line technicians and analystsworking to pluck signals out of the network.
Alexander, 61, has been a techno-spy since the beginning ofhis military career. After graduating from West Point in 1974, he went to WestGermany, where he was initiated in the dark arts of signals intelligence.Alexander spent his time eavesdropping on military communications emanatingfrom East Germany and Czechoslovakia. He was interested in the mechanics thatsupported this brand of espionage. He rose quickly through the ranks.
"It's rare to get a commander who understandstechnology," says a former Army officer who served with Alexander in 1995,when Alexander was in charge of the 525th Military Intelligence Brigade at FortBragg, North Carolina. "Even then he was into big data. You think of thewizards as the guys who are in their 20s." Alexander was 42 at the time.
At the turn of the century, Alexander took the big-dataapproachto counterterrorism. How well that method worked continues to be a matter ofintense debate. Surely discrete interceptions of terrorists' phone calls andemails have helped disrupt plots and prevent attacks. But huge volumes of datadon't always help catch potential plotters. Sometimes, the drive for more datajust means capturing more ordinary people in the surveillance driftnet.
When he ran INSCOM and was horning in on the NSA's turf,Alexander was fond of building charts that showed how a suspected terrorist wasconnected to a much broader network of people via his communications or thecontacts in his phone or email account.
"He had all these diagrams showing how this guy wasconnected to that guy and to that guy," says a former NSA official whoheard Alexander give briefings on the floor of the Information DominanceCenter. "Some of my colleagues and I were skeptical. Later, we had achance to review the information. It turns out that all [that] those guys wereconnected to were pizza shops."
A retired military officer who worked with Alexander alsodescribes a "massive network chart" that was purportedly about alQaeda and its connections in Afghanistan. Upon closer examination, the retiredofficer says, "We found there was no data behind the links. No verifiablesources. We later found out that a quarter of the guys named on the chart hadalready been killed in Afghanistan."
Those network charts have become more massive now thatAlexander is running the NSA. When analysts try to determine if a particularperson is engaged in terrorist activity, they may look at the communications ofpeople who are as many as three steps, or "hops," removed from theoriginal target. This means that even when the NSA is focused on just oneindividual, the number of people who are being caught up in the agency's electronicnets could easily be in the tens of millions.
According to an internal audit, the agency's surveillance operationshave been beset by human error and fooled by moving targets. Afterthe NSA's legal authorities were expanded and the PRISM program wasimplemented, the agency inadvertently collected Americans' communicationsthousands of times each year, between 2008 and 2012, in violation of privacyrules and the law.
Yet the NSA still pursued a counterterrorism strategy thatrelies on ever-bigger data sets. Under Alexander's leadership, one of theagency's signature analysis tools was a digital graph that showed how hundreds,sometimes thousands, of people, places, and events were connected to eachother. They were displayed as a tangle of dots and lines. Critics called it theBAG -- for "big ass graph" -- and said it produced very few usefulleads. CIA officials in charge of tracking overseas terrorist cells wereparticularly unimpressed by it. "I don't need this," a senior CIAofficer working on the agency's drone program once told an NSA analyst who showed up with abig, nebulous graph. "I just need you to tell me whose ass to put aHellfire missile on."
Given his pedigree, it's unsurprising that Alexander is adevotee of big data. "It was taken as a given for him, as a careerintelligence officer, that more information is better," says anotherretired military officer. "That was ingrained."
But Alexander was never alone in hisobsession. An obscure civilian engineer named James Heath has been a constantcompanion for a significant portion of Alexander's career. More than any oneperson, Heath influenced how the general went about building an informationempire.
Several former intelligence officials who worked with Heathdescribed him as Alexander's "mad scientist." Another called him theNSA director's "evil genius." For years, Heath, a brilliant butabrasive technologist, has been in charge of making Alexander's most ambitiousideas a reality; many of the controversial data-mining tools that Alexanderwanted to use against the NSA's raw intelligence were developed by Heath, forexample. "He's smart, crazy, and dangerous. He'll push the technology tothe limits to get it to do what he wants," says a former intelligenceofficial.
Heath has followed Alexander from post to post, but healmost always stays in the shadows. Heath recently retired from governmentservice as the senior science advisor to the NSA director -- Alexander'spersonal tech guru. "Thegeneral really looked to him for advice," says George, the formertechnical director. "Jim didn't mind breaking some eggs to make an omelet.He couldn't do that on his own, but General Alexander could. They brought asense of needing to get things done. They were a dynamic duo."
Precisely where Alexander met Heath is unclear. They haveworked together since at least 1995, when Alexander commanded the 525thMilitary Intelligence Brigade and Heath was his scientific sidekick."That's where Heath took his first runs at what he called 'datavisualization,' which is now called 'big data,'" says a retired militaryintelligence officer. Heath was building tools that helped commanders on thefield integrate information from different sensors -- reconnaissance planes,satellites, signals intercepts -- and "see" it on their screens.Later, Heath would work with tools that showed how words in a document or pageson the Internet were linked together, displaying those connections in the formof three-dimensional maps and graphs.
At the Information Dominance Center, Heath built a programcalled the "automatic ingestion manager." It was a search engine formassive sets of data, and in 1999, he started taking it for test runs on theInternet.
In one experiment, the retired officer says, the ingestionmanager searched for all web pages linked to the website of the DefenseIntelligence Agency (DIA). Those included every page on the DIA's site, and thetool scoured and copied them so aggressively that it was mistaken for a hostilecyberattack. The site's automated defenses kicked in and shut it down.
On another occasion, the searching tool landed on an anti-warwebsite while searching for information about the conflict in Kosovo. "Weimmediately got a letter from the owner of the site wanting to know why was themilitary spying on him," the retired officer says. As far as he knows, theowner took no legal action against the Army, and the test run was stopped.
Those experiments with "bleeding-edge" technology,as the denizens of the Information Dominance Center liked to call it, shapedHeath and Alexander's approach to technology in spy craft. And when theyascended to the NSA in 2005, their influence was broad and profound."These guys have propelled the intelligence community into big data,"says the retired officer.
Heath was at Alexander's side for the expansion of Internetsurveillance under the PRISM program. Colleagues say it fell largely to him todesign technologies that tried to make sense of all the new information the NSAwas gobbling up. But Heath had developed a reputation for building expensivesystems that never really work as promised and then leaving them half-baked inorder to follow Alexander on to some new mission.
"He moved fairly fast and loose with money and spent alot of it," the retired officer says. "He doubled the size of theInformation Dominance Center and then built another facility right next door toit. They didn't need it. It's just what Heath and Alexander wanted to do."The Information Operations Center, as it was called, was underused and spenttoo much money, says the retired officer. "It's a center in search of a customer."
Heath's reputation followed him to the NSA. In early 2010,weeks after a young al Qaeda terrorist with a bomb sewn into his underweartried to bring down a U.S. airliner over Detroit on Christmas Day, the directorof national intelligence, Dennis Blair, called for a new tool that would helpthe disparate intelligence agencies better connect the dots about terrorismplots. The NSA, the State Department, and the CIA each had possessed fragmentsof information about the so-called underwear bomber's intentions, but there hadbeen no dependable mechanism for integrating them all and providing what oneformer national security official described as "a quick-reactioncapability" so that U.S. security agencies would be warned about thebomber before he got on the plane.
Blair put the NSA in charge of building this new capability,and the task eventually fell to Heath. "It was a complete disaster,"says the former national security official, who was briefed on the project."Heath's approach was all based on signals intelligence [the kind the NSAroutinely collects] rather than taking into account all the other data comingin from the CIA and other sources. That's typical of Heath. He's got a verynarrow viewpoint to solve a problem."
Like other projects of Heath's, the former official says,this one was never fully implemented. As a result, the intelligence communitystill didn't have a way to stitch together clues from different databases intime to stop the next would-be bomber. Heath -- and Alexander -- moved on tothe next big project.
"There's two ways of looking at these guys," theretired military officer says. "Two visionaries who took risks and pushedthe intelligence community forward. Or as two guys who blew a monumental amountof money."
As immense as the NSA's missionhas become -- patrolling the world's data fields in search of terrorists, spies,and computer hackers -- it is merely one phase of Alexander's plan. The NSA'sprimary mission is to protect government systems and information. But under hisleadership, the agency is also extending its reach into the private sector inunprecedented ways.
Toward the end of George W. Bush's administration, Alexanderhelped persuade Defense Department officials to set up a computer network defenseproject to prevent foreign intelligence agencies --mainly China's -- fromstealing weapons plans and other national secrets from government contractors'computers.
Under the Defense Industrial Base initiative, also known asthe DIB, the NSA provides the companies with intelligence about thecyberthreats it's tracking. In return, the companies report back about whatthey see on their networks and share intelligence with each other.
Pentagon officials say the program has helped stop somecyber-espionage. But many corporate participants say Alexander's primary motivehas not been to share what the NSA knows about hackers. It's to getintelligence from the companies -- to make them the NSA's digital scouts. Whatis billed as an information-sharing arrangement has sometimes seemed more likea one-way street, leading straight to the NSA's headquarters at Fort Meade.
"We wanted companies to be able to share informationwith each other," says the former administration official, "to createa picture about the threats against them. The NSA wanted the picture."
After the DIB was up and running, Alexander proposed goingfurther. "He wanted to create a wall around other sensitive institutionsin America, to include financial institutions, and to install equipment tomonitor their networks," says the former administration official. "Hewanted this to be running in every Wall Street bank."
That aspect of the plan has never been fully implemented,largely due to legal concerns. If a company allowed the government to installmonitoring equipment on its systems, a court could decide that the company wasacting as an agent of the government. And if surveillance were conductedwithout a warrant or legitimate connection to an investigation, the companycould be accused of violating the Fourth Amendment. Warrantless surveillancecan be unconstitutional regardless of whether the NSA or Google or GoldmanSachs is doing it.
"That's a subtle point, and that subtlety was oftenlost on NSA," says the former administration official. "Alexander hasignored that Fourth Amendment concern."
The DIB experiment was a first step toward Alexander'staking more control over the country's cyberdefenses, and it was illustrativeof his assertive approach to the problem. "He was always challenging us onthe defensive side to be more aware and to try and find and counter thethreat," says Tony Sager, who was the chief operating officer for theNSA's Information Assurance Directorate, which protects classified governmentinformation and computers. "He wanted to know, 'Who are the bad guys? Howdo we go after them?'"
While it's a given that the NSA cannot monitor the entireInternet on its own and that it needs intelligence from companies, Alexanderhas questioned whether companies have the capacity to protect themselves."What we see is an increasing level of activity on the networks," hesaidrecently at a security conference in Canada. "I am concerned that this isgoing to break a threshold where the private sector can no longer handle it andthe government is going to have to step in."
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Now, for the first time in Alexander's career, Congress andthe general public are expressing deep misgivings about sharing informationwith the NSA or letting it install surveillance equipment. A Rasmussen poll oflikely voters taken in June found that 68 percent believe it's likely the government islistening to their communications, despite repeated assurances from Alexanderand President Barack Obama that the NSA is only collecting anonymous metadataabout Americans' phone calls. In another Rasmussen poll, 57 percent of respondents said they think it'slikely that the government will use NSA intelligence "to harass politicalopponents."
Some who know Alexander say he doesn't appreciate the depthof public mistrust and cynicism about the NSA's mission. "People in theintelligence community in general, and certainly Alexander, don't understandthe strategic value of having a largely unified country and a long-term trustin the intelligence business," says a former intelligence official, whohas worked with Alexander. Another adds, "There's a feeling within the NSAthat they're all patriotic citizens interested in protecting privacy, but theylose sight of the fact that people don't trust the government."
Even Alexander's strongest critics don't doubt his goodintentions. "He's not a nefarious guy," says the formeradministration official. "I really do feel like he believes he's doingthis for the right reasons." Two of the retired military officers who haveworked with him say Alexander was seared by the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000and later the 9/11 attacks, a pair of major intelligence failures that occurredwhile he was serving in senior-level positions in military intelligence. Theysaid he vowed to do all he could to prevent another attack that could take thelives of Americans and military service members.
But those who've worked closely with Alexander say he hasbecome blinded by the power of technology. "He believes they have enoughtechnical safeguards in place at the NSA to protect civil liberties and performtheir mission," the former administration official says. "They dohave a very robust capability -- probably better than any other agency. But hedoesn't get that this power can still be abused. Americans want introspection.Transparency is a good thing. He doesn't understand that. In his mind it's 'Youshould trust me, and in exchange, I give you protection.'"
On July 30 in Las Vegas, Alexander sat down for dinner witha group of civil liberties activists and Internet security researchers. He wasin town to give a keynote address the next day at the Black Hat security conference. The mood at the table was chilly,according to people who were in attendance. In 2012, Alexander had won plauditsfor his speech at Black Hat's sister conference, Def Con, in which he'd implored the assembled community of expertsto join him in their mutual cause: protecting the Internet as a safe space forspeech, communications, and commerce. Now, however, nearly two months after thefirst leaks from Snowden, the people around the table wondered whether theycould still trust the NSA director.
His dinner companions questioned Alexander about the NSA'slegal authority to conduct massive electronic surveillance. Two guests hadrecently written a New York Times op-ed calling the NSA's activities"criminal." Alexander was quick to debate the finer points of the lawand defend his agency's programs -- at least the ones that have been revealed-- as closely monitored and focused solely on terrorists' information.
But he also tried to convince his audience that they shouldhelp keep the NSA's surveillance system running. In so many words, Alexandertold them: The terrorists only have to succeed once to kill thousands ofpeople. And if they do, all of the rules we have in place to protect people'sprivacy will go out the window.
Alexander cast himself as the ultimate defender of civilliberties, as a man who needs to spy on some people in order to protecteveryone. He knows that in the wake of another major terrorist attack on U.S.soil, the NSA will be unleashed to find the perpetrators and stop the nextassault. Random searches of metadata, broad surveillance of purely domesticcommunications, warrantless seizure of stored communications -- presumablythese and other extraordinary measures would be on the table. Alexander may nothave spelled out just what the NSA would do after another homeland strike, butthe message was clear: We don't want to find out.
Alexander was asking his dinner companions to trust him. Buthis credibility has been badly damaged. Alexander was heckled at his speech thenext day at Black Hat. He had been slated to talk at Def Con too, but theorganizers rescinded their invitation after the Snowden leaks. And even amongAlexander's cohort, trust is flagging.
"You'll never find evidence that Keith sits in hisoffice at lunch listening to tapes of U.S. conversations," says a formerNSA official. "But I think he has a little bit of naiveté about thiscontroversy. He thinks, 'What's the problem? I wouldn't abuse this power.Aren't we all honorable people?' People get into these insular worlds out thereat NSA. I think Keith fits right in."
One of the retired military officers, who worked withAlexander on several big-data projects, said he was shaken by revelations thatthe agency is collecting all Americans' phone records and examining enormousamounts of Internet traffic. "I've not changed my opinion on the rightbalance between security versus privacy, but what the NSA is doing bothersme," he says. "It's the massive amount of information they're collecting.I know they're not listening to everyone's phone calls. No one has time forthat. But speaking as an analyst who has used metadata, I do not sleep well atnight knowing these guys can see everything. That trust has been lost."