keith alexander
Former NSA Chief Keith Alexander--Who Lied About Mass Surveillance--Joins Amazon's Board
The former Army general is "personally responsible for the unlawful mass surveillance programs that caused a global scandal," says NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.Â
Keith Alexander--a retired four-star U.S. Army general and former National Security Agency director who infamously lied about the federal government's mass surveillance program--has joined the board of Amazon, the online retail giant announced Thursday.
News that Alexander, co-chief executive officer of IronNet Cybersecurity Inc., is joining Amazon's audit committee first came in the form of a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing on Wednesday.
"It turns out 'Hey Alexa' is short for 'Hey Keith Alexander.' Yes, the Keith Alexander personally responsible for the unlawful mass surveillance programs that caused a global scandal."
--Edward Snowden
Over the course of his 40-year military career, Alexander led the Army Intelligence and Security Command in the post-9/11 period, running a network of more than 10,000 spies and eavesdroppers around the world. In 2003 he was named deputy chief of staff for intelligence for the Army during a time when members of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade were torturing detainees at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
After that horrific abuse was revealed to the world, Alexander joined other top Bush administration officials in issuing a memorandum seeking to justify the unlawful treatment of detainees in the so-called "War on Terror," including their detention at the notorious Guantanamo Bay military prison.
In 2005, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld appointed Alexander director of the NSA, a position he would hold until he retired in 2014, a year after revelations by former CIA contractor and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden regarding the agency's global mass phone surveillance program, which including spying on millions of Americans.
Alexander--who also headed U.S. Cyber Command from 2010 until his retirement--lied in 2012, claiming the NSA does not collect data on American citizens. He repeated this lie while testifying under oath before Congress.
Last week, a federal appeals court unanimously ruled that the NSA's warrantless surveillance of Americans' phone records was illegal.
Amazon itself has faced accusations it spies on and profiles its users through its Alexa-driven devices. Amazon keeps copies of everything its Alexa smart speakers record, and last year the company admitted that its employees listen to customer voice recordings on its Echo and Alexa devices--reportedly including people having sex and possible sexual assaults.
Reacting to the news of Alexander joining Amazon, Snowden tweeted from exile in Russia that "it turns out that 'Hey, Alexa' is short for 'Hey, Keith Alexander.'"
\u201c\ud83d\udea8\ud83d\udea8 It turns out "Hey Alexa" is short for "Hey Keith Alexander." Yes, the Keith Alexander personally responsible for the unlawful mass surveillance programs that caused a global scandal. And Amazon Web Services (AWS) host ~6% of all websites. \ud83d\udea8\ud83d\udea8\nhttps://t.co/6hkzsHjxh9\u201d— Edward Snowden (@Edward Snowden) 1599692163
Amazon's privacy violations aren't just limited to its devices. Earlier this month, VICEreported the company sought to hire intelligence analysts to track "labor organizing threats" inside the company. The online retailer--whose founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, the world's richest person, recently became the first-ever multi-centibillionaire--also operated a secret surveillance program to spy on its workers' private Facebook groups.
\u201cLast week @Amazon was caught trying to hire former private military contractors to spy on workers and activists. \n\nThey claimed it was a mistake.\n\nToday they place the former head of the NSA on the board, yes, the one who Snowden exposed.\n\nhttps://t.co/lfXyX7sTJg\u201d— Athena Coalition (@Athena Coalition) 1599690833
A report (pdf) last month from Open Markets Institute also highlighted how Amazon has built a web of surveillance infrastructure to spy on its workers.
Former NSA Chief: Why I'm Worth $1 Million a Month to Wall Street
Critics say Keith Alexander's rapid move to the private sector is cause for concern
Former NSA Director Keith Alexander says his services warrant a fee of up to a million dollars, due to a cyber-surveillance technique he and his partners at his new security firm IronNet Cybersecurity have developed, Foreign Policyreported on Tuesday. The claim follows reporting earlier this month that Alexander is slated to head a 'cyber-war council' backed by Wall Street.
Alexander claims that the new technology is different from anything the NSA has done as it uses "behavioral models" to predict hackers' actions ahead of time.
In his article, "The NSA's Cyber-King Goes Corporate," Foreign Policy journalist Shane Harris says that Alexander stated that IronNet has already signed contracts with three separate companies, although Alexander declined to name them. He plans on filing at least nine patents for the technology and finishing the testing phase of it by the end of September.
While it's not uncommon for former government employees to be granted patents for their inventions, Alexander is thought to be the first ex-NSA director to apply for patents "directly related to the job he had in government," said Harris.
"Alexander is on firm legal ground so long as he can demonstrate that his invention is original and sufficiently distinct from any other patented technologies," according to Harris. Therefore when he files the patents, if he can prove that he "invented the technology on his own time and separate from his core duties, he might have a stronger argument to retain the exclusive rights to the patent."
According to critics, Alexander's very experience as the NSA director has informed his move to the corporate sector--whether or not he developed the technology independently--and that in itself is cause for alarm and a possible investigation.
"Alexander stands to profit directly off of his taxpayer-funded experience, and may do so with a competitive advantage over other competing private firms," Carl Franzen pointed out at The Verge.
"Is it ethical for an NSA chief to pursue patents on technologies directly related to their work running the agency?" wrote Xeni Jardin of boingboing. "Will the Justice Department investigate? Don't hold your breath."
Journalist Dan Froomkin of The Intercept weighed in on Twitter:
\u201cKeith Alexander\u2019s new business model stinks to high heaven. But we already knew he was shameless: https://t.co/AIJ56Wh6tL\u201d— Dan Froomkin/PressWatchers.org (@Dan Froomkin/PressWatchers.org) 1406638628
As independent journalist Marcy Wheeler pointed out on her blog, there are a multitude of questions still remaining concerning the legality of Alexander's services, that are unrelated to the issue of patent legality. Among those she poses this:
with Alexander out of his NSA, where will he and his profitable partners get the data they need to model threats? How much of this model will depend on the Cyber Information sharing plan that Alexander has demanded for years? How much will Alexander's privatized solutions to the problem he couldn't solve at NSA depend on access to all the information the government has, along with immunity?
To what degree is CISA about making Keith Alexander rich?
The NSA's own actions under Alexander seem to have laid the groundwork for the exact cyber-defense market the retired general is now looking to exploit.
When Alexander first addressed Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association shortly after his retirement in March, company executives were apparently most interested in learning about destructive programs such as Wiper, which the U.S. government has claimed was used in cyber-attacks originating in North Korea and Iran.
Harris says the singling out of programs like Wiper is "a supreme irony" in the eyes of many computer security experts, who say that it is nothing more than "a cousin of the notorious Stuxnet virus, which was built by the NSA -- while Alexander was in charge -- in cooperation with Israeli intelligence."
US Officials Conversed About UK Attempt to Destroy Guardian Files
New documents seem to betray statements about incident where computers were smashed by intelligence agents
New documents obtained by the Associated Press under a Feedom of Infomation Act request appear to reveal that high-level officials knew in advance that British agents were attempting to destroy documents leaked by Edward Snowden that were contained on computers owned by the Guardian newspaper.
Though the "White House had publicly distanced itself on whether it would do the same to an American news organization," reports the AP, the internal NSA emails show "senior intelligence officials were notified of Britain's intent to retrieve the Snowden documents and that one senior U.S. official appeared to praise the effort."
According to AP:
"Good news, at least on this front," the current NSA deputy director, Richard Ledgett, said at the end of a short, censored email to then-NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander and others. The subject of that July 19, 2013, email was: "Guardian data being destroyed." A paragraph before Ledgett's comment was blacked out by censors, and the NSA declined to answer questions about the documents.
The White House said Thursday the comment from Ledgett -- then the head of the NSA's Media Leaks Task Force -- was confined to intelligence operations because it was "good news" that classified information was recovered and "didn't reflect a broader administration view" on press freedoms.
The Guardian's hard drives were destroyed the day after Ledgett's email. Top editor Alan Rusbridger made the decision after a week of increasingly blunt threats from British officials. A senior aide to British Prime Minister David Cameron even warned that Rusbridger's nearly 200-year-old newspaper faced closure unless the documents were destroyed.
Responding to the developments, a spokesperson for the Guardian said:
We're disappointed to learn that cross-Atlantic conversations were taking place at the very highest levels of government ahead of the bizarre destruction of journalistic material that took place in the Guardian's basement last July.
What's perhaps most concerning is that the disclosure of these emails appears to contradict the White House's comments about these events last year, when they questioned the appropriateness of the UK government's intervention.
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