John McCain Says NSA Chief Keith Alexander ‘Should Resign or Be Fired’

English: John McCain official photo portrait. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Karen McVeigh | Guardian UK | Reader Supported News | November 11, 2013

Senator gives interview to Der Spiegel, saying general should ‘be held accountable’ for Edward Snowden leaks.

enator John McCain has called for Keith Alexander to “resign or be fired” as the head of the National Security Agency, in an interview with the German news weekly Der Spiegel published on Sunday.

The senator for Arizona, a former Republican presidential candidate, said Alexander should be held accountable for the leaks of thousands of documents by the whistleblower Edward Snowden, which revealed NSA surveillance and spying on a massive scale. McCain said Snowden, who worked for the NSA as a contractor, should never have had access to classified information.

“And now we have a contractor employee, not a government employee, who has access to information which is, when revealed, most damaging to the standing prestige of the United States and our relations with some of our best friends,” McCain said. “Why did Edward Snowden have that information? And what are we doing as far as screening people who have access to this information? It’s outrageous, and someone ought to be held accountable.”

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NSA Veterans: The White House Is Hanging Us Out to Dry

National Security Agency Seal (Photo credit: DonkeyHotey)

SHANE HARRIS | Social Reader | October 13, 2013

Gen.Keith Alexander and his senior leadership team at the National Security Agency are angry and dispirited by what they see as the White House’s failure to defend the spy agency against criticism of its surveillance programs, according to four people familiar with the NSA chiefs’ thinking. The top brass of the country’s biggest spy agency feels they’ve been left twisting in the wind,abandoned by the White House and left largely to defend themselves in public and in Congress against allegations of unconstitutional spying on Americans.

Former intelligence officials closely aligned with the NSA criticized President Obama for saying little publicly to defend the agency, and for not emphasizing that some leaked or officially disclosed documents arguably show the NSA operating within its legal authorities.

“There has been no support for the agency from the President or his staff or senior administration officials, and this has not gone unnoticed by both senior officials and the rank and file at the Fort,” said Joel Brenner, the NSA’s one-time inspector general, referring to the agency’s headquarters at Ft.Meade, Maryland.

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Extended Ruling by Secret Court Backs Collection of Phone Data

Official portrait of NSA director Keith B. Alexander. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

CHARLIE SAVAGE | New York Times | September 17, 2013

WASHINGTON — The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Tuesday offered its most extensive public explanation for why it has allowed the government to keep records of all Americans’ phone calls, releasing a previously classified opinion in which it said the program was constitutional and did not violate Americans’ privacy rights.

While the once-secret call log program has been periodically reapproved by the court since 2006, it has come under criticism from members of Congress of both parties and civil libertarians since its existence came to public light in June after leaks by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden.

In a 29-page opinion that quoted the N.S.A. director, Keith Alexander, as saying the leaks had caused “significant and irreversible damage” to national security, Judge Claire V. Eagan, a federal judge in the Northern District of Oklahoma, declared that the program was lawful. So, she wrote, any decision about whether to keep it was a political question, not a legal one.

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Inside the Mind of NSA Chief Gen. Keith Alexander

Official portrait of NSA director Keith B. Alexander. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Glenn Greenwald | Guardian UK | Reader Supported News | September 15, 2013

A lavish Star Trek room he had built as part of his ‘Information Dominance Center’ is endlessly revealing.

It has been previously reported that the mentality of NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander is captured by his motto “Collect it All”. It’s a get-everything approach he pioneered first when aimed at an enemy population in the middle of a war zone in Iraq, one he has now imported onto US soil, aimed at the domestic population and everyone else.

But a perhaps even more disturbing and revealing vignette into the spy chief’s mind comes from a new Foreign Policy article describing what the journal calls his “all-out, barely-legal drive to build the ultimate spy machine”. The article describes how even his NSA peers see him as a “cowboy” willing to play fast and loose with legal limits in order to construct a system of ubiquitous surveillance. But the personality driving all of this – not just Alexander’s but much of Washington’s – is perhaps best captured by this one passage, highlighted by PBS’ News Hour in a post entitled: “NSA director modeled war room after Star Trek’s Enterprise”. The room was christened as part of the “Information Dominance Center”:

“When he was running the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command, 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.
“‘Everybody wanted to sit in the chair at least once to pretend he was Jean-Luc Picard,’ says a retired officer in charge of VIP visits.”

Numerous commentators remarked yesterday on the meaning of all that (note, too, how “Total Information Awareness” was a major scandal in the Bush years, but “Information Dominance Center” – along with things like “Boundless Informant” – are treated as benign or even noble programs in the age of Obama).

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Alone and Delusional on Planet Earth

The seal of the U.S. National Security Agency. The first use was in September 1966, replacing an older seal which was used briefly. For more information, see here and here. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Tom Engelhardt | TomDispatch | Reader Supported News | September 20, 2013

In an increasingly phantasmagorical world, here’s my present fantasy of choice: someone from General Keith Alexander‘s outfit, the National Security Agency, tracks down H.G. Wells’s time machine in the attic of an old house in London.  Britain’s subservient Government Communications Headquarters, its version of the NSA, is paid off and the contraption is flown to Fort Meade, Maryland, where it’s put back in working order.  Alexander then revs it up and heads not into the future like Wells to see how our world ends, but into the past to offer a warning to Americans about what’s to come.

He arrives in Washington on October 23, 1962, in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a day after President Kennedy has addressed the American people on national television to tell them that this planet might not be theirs — or anyone else’s — for long.  (“We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth, but neither will we shrink from the risk at any time it must be faced.”)  Greeted with amazement by the Washington elite, Alexander, too, goes on television and informs the same public that, in 2013, the major enemy of the United States will no longer be the Soviet Union, but an outfit called al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), and that the headquarters of our country’s preeminent foe will be found somewhere in the rural backlands of… Yemen.

Yes, Yemen, a place most Americans, then and now, would be challenged to find on a world map.  I guarantee you one thing: had such an announcement actually been made that day, most Americans would undoubtedly have dropped to their knees and thanked God for His blessings on the American nation.  Though even then a nonbeliever, I would undoubtedly have been among them.  After all, the 18-year-old Tom Engelhardt, on hearing Kennedy’s address, genuinely feared that he and the few pathetic dreams of a future he had been able to conjure up were toast.

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Government Doesn’t Know How Snowden Did It

Official portrait of NSA director Keith B. Alexander. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Natasha Lennard | Salon | Reader Supported News | August 26, 2013

The U.S. government has admitted that it does not know how much classified information whistle-blower Edward Snowden possesses, as the leakers carefully covered his digital tracks. As such, the authorities have little sense of how many more indicting NSA revelations are yet to come from leaked documents. As the AP noted:

The government’s forensic investigation is wrestling with Snowden’s apparent ability to defeat safeguards established to monitor and deter people looking at information without proper permission, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the sensitive developments publicly.
The disclosure undermines the Obama administration’s assurances to Congress and the public that the NSA surveillance programs can’t be abused because its spying systems are so aggressively monitored and audited for oversight purposes: If Snowden could defeat the NSA’s own tripwires and internal burglar alarms, how many other employees or contractors could do the same?
In July, nearly two months after Snowden’s earliest disclosures, NSA Director Keith Alexander declined to say whether he had a good idea of what Snowden had downloaded or how many NSA files Snowden had taken with him, noting an ongoing criminal investigation.

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Why Wasn’t the NSA Prepared?

Allan Friedman | The Atlantic | Washington Post | August 23, 2013

NSA Director Keith Alexander answers questions at a hacker conference on July 31, 2013. (Steve Marcus/Reuters)

In the coming weeks, Congress and the civilian defense leadership will have to ask a lot of questions about the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs, and how to reconcile them with privacy concerns. But they will also have to ask a more basic set of questions: Why on earth wasn’t the NSA prepared for this? Why didn’t the intelligence agency’s leadership have a plan to deal with the global outcry that would follow the leak of classified Internet surveillance programs?

Contingency planning is a critical part of every military operation, and is even more important for secret or covert activities. The Central Intelligence Agency and Special Forces Command examined every possible thing that could go wrong on the raid to kill Osama bin Laden, for example, and had clear plans to deal with any ensuing fallout. Although it has an intelligence mandate, the NSA is a Defense Department organization, and the director of NSA is a 4-star general. As such, it is troubling that the NSA appears to have no plan in place for how to respond once its spying program was made public and plastered on the front pages around the world. Instead, the best defense General Alexander could offer a room full of security professionals at the Black Hat convention, almost two months after the leak, was an explanation of FISA courts and the successful prosecution of a San Diego cab driver who sent money to a Somali militia.

The NSA leadership had ample warning signs that leaks were possible, and that public reaction in the U.S. and around the world would be overwhelmingly negative. In 2003, Congress shut down Admiral Poindexter’s ‘Total Information Awareness’ program after concerns that building massive databases of electronic transactions generated too many privacy concerns to justify the anti-terror benefits. After Bradley Manning turned over classified State Department and Defense Department data to Wikileaks, the entire security establishment should have been on notice that sensitive programs could be disclosed.

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Apple, Google, LinkedIn, Yahoo! and Twitter Letter to Obama on Surveillance

The seal of the U.S. National Security Agency. The first use was in September 1966, replacing an older seal which was used briefly. For more information, see here and here. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Reuters | Reader Supported News | July 19, 2013

ozens of companies, non-profits and trade organizations including Apple Inc (NSQ:AAPL), Google Inc (NSQ:GOOG) and Facebook Inc (FB.O) sent a letter on Thursday pushing the Obama administration and Congress for more disclosures on the government’s national security-related requests for user data.

General Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency, suggested he was open to the idea but that officials were trying to determine a way to disclose that information without jeopardizing FBI investigations.

“We just want to make sure we do it right, that we don’t impact anything ongoing with the FBI. I think that’s the reasonable approach,” Alexander told the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado, when asked about the letter.

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Senators Challenge NSA’s Claim to Have Foiled ‘Dozens’ of Terror Attacks

Spencer Ackerman | Guardian UK | Reader Supported News | June 14, 2013

Mark Udall and Ron Wyden – critics of NSA’s surveillance – say they want proof that programs have disrupted plots against US

Two prominent Senate critics of the NSA’s dragnet surveillance have challenged the agency’s assertion that the spy efforts helped stop “dozens” of terror attacks.

Mark Udall and Ron Wyden, both members of the Senate intelligence committee, said they were not convinced by the testimony of the NSA director, General Keith Alexander, on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, who claimed that evidence gleaned from surveillance helped thwart attacks in the US.

“We have not yet seen any evidence showing that the NSA’s dragnet collection of Americans’ phone records has produced any uniquely valuable intelligence,” they said in a statement released on Thursday ahead of a widely anticipated briefing for US senators about the National Security Agency’s activities.

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NSA leaker Snowden is lying, say leaders of House Intelligence Committee

Mike Lillis | The Hill | June 13, 2013

The NSA leaker is lying about both his access to information and the scope of  the secret surveillance programs he uncovered, the heads of the House  Intelligence Committee charged Thursday.

Emerging from a hearing with NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander, Reps. Mike  Rogers (R-Mich.), chairman of the Intelligence Committee, and Dutch  Ruppersberger (Md.), the senior Democrat on the panel, said Edward Snowden  simply wasn’t in the position to access the content of the communications  gathered under National Security Agency programs, as he’s claimed.

“He was lying,” Rogers said. “He clearly has over-inflated his position, he has  over-inflated his access and he’s even over-inflated what the actually  technology of the programs would allow one to do. It’s impossible for him to do  what he was saying he could do.”

“He’s done tremendous damage to the country where he was born and raised and  educated,” Ruppersberger said.

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