Spymaster Wants to Outlaw Reporting on NSA Spying

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

Jim Hightower | JimHightower.com | Reader Supported News | December 12, 2013

n the movie plot of a spy thriller, our hero gets captured by agents of a repressive government, and they take him into a dark interrogation room, where the sadistic spymaster hisses at him: “We have ways of making you talk.”

Meanwhile, in real life, the director of our National Security Agency hisses at journalists: “We have ways of keeping you from talking.” Well, not quite in those words, but Gen. Keith Alexander, chief spook at NSA and head of US Cyber Command, did reveal a chilling disrespect for our Constitutional right to both free speech and a free press. In an October interview, he called for outlawing any reporting on his agency’s secret program of spying on every American: “I think it’s wrong that newspaper reporters have all these documents… giving them out as if these – you know it just doesn’t make any sense.” Then came his spooky punch line: “We ought to come up with a way of stopping it… It’s wrong to allow this to go on.”

Holy Thomas Paine! Spy on us, okay; report on it, not. What country does this autocrat represent? Alexander’s secret, indiscriminate, supercomputer scooping-up of data on every phone call, email, and other private business of every American is what “doesn’t make any sense.” It’s an Orwellian, mass invasion of everyone’s privacy, creating the kind of routine, 24/7 surveillance state our government loudly deplores in China and Russia – and it amounts to stomping on our Fourth Amendment guarantee that we’re to be free of “unreasonable searches and seizures.”

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Key officials advocate NSA, Cyber Command leadership be split up

National Security Agency Seal (Photo credit: DonkeyHotey)

Ellen Nakashima | The Washington Post | Social Reader | November 30, 2013

Key senior administration officials have advocated splitting the leadership of the nation’s largest spy agency from that of the military’s cyberwarfare command as a final White House decision nears, according to individuals briefed on the discussions.

At a White House meeting of senior national security officials last week, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. said he was in favor of ending the current policy of having one official in charge of both the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command, said the individuals, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Also, officials appear inclined to install a civilian as director of the NSA for the first time in the agency’s 61-year history. Among those said to be potential successors to the current director, Gen. Keith B. Alexander, is his deputy, John C. “Chris” Inglis.

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The Crux of the NSA Story: ‘Collect it All’

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

The actual story that matters is not hard to see: the NSA is attempting to collect, monitor and store all forms of human communication.

The Washington Post this morning has a long profile of Gen. Keith Alexander, director the NSA, and it highlights the crux – the heart and soul – of the NSA stories, the reason Edward Snowden sacrificed his liberty to come forward, and the obvious focal point for any responsible or half-way serious journalists covering this story. It helpfully includes that crux right in the headline, in a single phrase:

What does “collect it all” mean? Exactly what it says; the Post explains how Alexander took a “collect it all” surveillance approach originally directed at Iraqis in the middle of a war, and thereafter transferred it so that it is now directed at the US domestic population as well as the global one:

“At the time, more than 100 teams of US analysts were scouring Iraq for snippets of electronic data that might lead to the bomb-makers and their hidden factories. But the NSA director, Gen. Keith B. Alexander, wanted more than mere snippets. He wanted everything: Every Iraqi text message, phone call and e-mail that could be vacuumed up by the agency’s powerful computers.

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Secrecy’s Tangled Web of Deceit

Ray McGovern | Consortium News | June 15, 2013

U.S. government officials insist that their secret surveillance techniques are so valuable in fighting “terrorism” that they must be kept completely in the dark – along with the American people. This alleged imperative has justified even lying to Congress, as ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern observes.

The name card at the Senate hearing read, “Hon. General Keith B. Alexander,” but layering on the extra honorific title was not enough to change the sad reality that the National Security Agency’s director – a proven prevaricator – was not “honorable.”

You might have thought that some impish congressional staffer was trying to inject a touch of irony into the proceedings by prefacing “General” with “Hon.” – like Mark Antony mocking Julius Caesar’s murderers as “honorable men” in Shakespeare’s play. But that didn’t seem to be the case.

Likely, the extra title was just a mistake by the person printing out the name cards or someone who thought it would do no harm to tack on one more flattering title like a court herald might do in announcing the arrival of royalty. But – whatever the case – the image of Alexander, with his history of lying to Congress (see below), sitting behind the assurance that he was “honorable” might have elicited from the Bard a comment like, “Methinks they doth protest too much.”

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N.S.A. Chief Says Phone Logs Halted Terror Threats

Christopher Gregory/The New York Times

Gen. Keith B. Alexander, the director of the National Security Agency, testified Wednesday before a Senate committee.

DAVID E. SANGER, CHARLIE SAVAGE and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT | New York Times | June 12, 2013

WASHINGTON — The director of the National Security Agency told Congress on Wednesday that “dozens” of terrorism threats had been halted by the agency’s huge database of the logs of nearly every domestic phone call made by Americans, while a senator briefed on the program disclosed that the telephone records are destroyed after five years.

The director, Gen. Keith B. Alexander, who heads both the N.S.A. and United States Cyber Command, which runs the military’s offensive and defensive use of cyberweapons, told skeptical members of the Senate Appropriations Committee that his agency was doing exactly what Congress authorized after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

General Alexander said he welcomed debate over the legal justification for the program because “what we’re doing to protect American citizens here is the right thing.” He said the agency “takes great pride in protecting this nation and our civil liberties and privacy” under the oversight of Congress and the courts.

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NSA Enforces Zero-Tolerance Policy on Conscience

Andy Borowitz | The New Yorker | June 10, 2013

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—The National Security Agency moved swiftly and forcefully today to remind its employees of its longstanding zero-tolerance policy on conscience, warning that any violation of that policy would result in immediate termination.

“When you sign on to work at the N.S.A. you swear to uphold the standards of amorality and soullessness that this agency was founded upon,” said N.S.A. director General Keith B. Alexander. “Any evidence of ethics, decency, or a sense of right and wrong will not be tolerated. These things have no place in the intelligence community.”

To enforce the policy, General Alexander said that once a month all N.S.A. employees will be wired to a computer to take full inventory of what is going on in their minds: “We want to be sure they are spending their free time playing Call of Duty, not reading the Federalist Papers.”

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