The NSA's Cyber-King Goes Corporate

Pretty amazing that the former director of the NSA can start a company in his former employer's space without being sued and yet as programmers we can't get a job anywhere without signing huge stacks of papers that make doing the same nearly impossible, or scary enough to where we don't even bother.

rayiner2• 12 years ago

The NSA's job isn't private cyber security. Also, non-competes are evil.

droopyEyelids• 12 years ago

The point is there seems to be different rules governing people who come from different positions or social classes in our society.

ihsw3• 12 years ago

Suing General Alexander would probably do more harm than good -- this stint in the private industry is likely just another carrot on a stick that he's offering to the world's greatest hackers.

"Work for the NSA and you get will leave with a very powerful patent portfolio, and (most importantly) minimal risk of getting sued!"

nanomage3• 12 years ago

I demand a review of all his equipment to see if he was using Govt equipment and/or time to work on these ideas. If so, no patent awarded. VS commercial sector where patents go to court and end up in the hands of the parent company that provided the equipment.

incision2• 12 years ago

'What insights or expertise about cybersecurity could possibly justify such a sky-high fee, some wondered, even for a man as well-connected in the military-industrial complex as the former head of the nation's largest intelligence agency?'

The same sort of insights and expertise that athletes put into stuff sold by Nike, Adidas or Gatorade.

It's an endorsement deal.

JTon• 12 years ago

I think it's a little more than an endorsement deal. He knows deep inside information into what surveillance programs the NSA operates. I read it as follows: "we guarantee your company's IT infrastructure will no longer be seen as a low hanging fruit to the NSA"

rayiner2• 12 years ago

He's not a clueless career bureaucrat. He's been in the cybersecurity business for a very long time (from his Wiki page):

Alexander worked on signals intelligence at a number of secret National Security Agency bases in the United States and Germany. He earned an MS in business administration in 1978 from Boston University, an MS in systems technology (electronic warfare) and an MS in physics in 1983 from the Naval Postgraduate School, and an MS in national security strategy from the National Defense University.

While the government is often woefully behind the private sector, it's also sometimes several steps ahead.[1] You might not like his views about the right balance between security and privacy, but I wouldn't underestimate the kind of insight Alexander can bring to the table, for reasons that have nothing to do with his political pull with the NSA.

[1] Anecdote: I worked on a DARPA project about a decade ago. Commercial implementation of similar technology is probably another decade out. And that was pretty run of the mill stuff, nothing classified. I can only imagine the type of shit you run into at the NSA. The military often just hits a particular pressure point before the private sector does, and they have the money to throw experts at the problem.

easytiger3• 12 years ago

He knows deep inside information into what surveillance programs the NSA operates.

I assume any application of that information would have him arrested too.

incision2• 12 years ago

'I think it's a little more than an endorsement deal.

Sure.

He's quite educated, decorated, extremely experienced and I don't doubt there's legitimate product/services ready to be sold.

That's not really the question though.

It's how much distance there is between whatever the highly educated, experienced, pre-eminent security consultants not named Keith Alexander are paid and $1M per month. It's also a matter of who is willing to pay that much and why.

fiatmoney• 12 years ago

Also, a protection racket. See also Dropbox having Condi Rice on their board.

geetee2• 12 years ago

Wiper is a cousin of the notorious Stuxnet virus, which was built by the NSA -- while Alexander was in charge -- in cooperation with Israeli intelligence. Have the Stuxnet creators actually been proven to be the US and Israel? I thought it was still speculation (but almost certainly true).

DCKing2• 12 years ago

There was a lot of circumstantial evidence pointing to this fact already, and Snowden finally confirmed this last year in an interview with Der Spiegel [1].

[1] http://cryptome.org/2013/07/snowden-spiegel-13-0707-en.htm

geetee2• 12 years ago

Ah thanks. I had read about a lot of evidence pointing in the USA's direction, but didn't realize Snowden also confirmed it. Arguably still hearsay, but certainly adds more weight to it.

MisterWebz• 12 years ago

I'm sure he'd charge them even more if it weren't for Snowden devaluing some of the information he knows.

ihsw3• 12 years ago

Nonsense, Snowden's revelations give credence to the NSA's capability. One could even say that Keith Alexander owes Snowden a great deal of his notoriety to him.

easytiger3• 12 years ago

Without Snowden no one would take him seriously Id venture to say.

AdmiralAsshat• 12 years ago

"It was those kinds of hackers who Alexander, when he was running the NSA, said were responsible for "the greatest transfer of wealth in American history" because they were routinely stealing trade secrets and competitive information from U.S. companies and giving it to their competitors, often in China."

Oh, and here I thought the greatest transfer of wealth in American history was the massive rise in disparity over the last thirty years between the nation's top 0.1% and everyone else.

ihsw3• 12 years ago

That's consolidation of wealth -- transfer (in this context) implies it leaves sphere of American influence.

rhizome• 12 years ago

No, the analogy holds. One is across national borders, the other across economic strata. Here is an article from Forbes describing welfare as wealth transfer:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2011/07/15/mak...

crazy1van• 12 years ago

Oh, and here I thought the greatest transfer of wealth in American history was the massive rise in disparity over the last thirty years between the nation's top 0.1% and everyone else.

Not all changes in economic status are transfers of wealth. Consider two cases:

1) I physically steal a CD from the record store and sell it. That's a transfer because the store can't sell what they no longer posses. Instead I have sold it. Nothing new is created.

2) I create an album and sell CDs of it. That's not a transfer. I created something new of value and introduced it to the world. I may get wealthy, but the people who buy my CD don't lose value. They exchange one thing of value (money) for another of equivalent value to them (my CD).

bradleyjg• 12 years ago

I wouldn't hire a security company run by the former head of the NSA. Is there any question in anyone's mind that if he was approached by the government to put a backdoor in your company's product or infrastructure, he wouldn't hesitate for a second to say yes?

dllthomas3• 12 years ago

The government never paid him a million dollars.

uptown• 12 years ago

How would you know? The US intelligence budget clocks in around $52 billion. You don't think a few million could be allocated if it was the most-expedient way of making something happen?

Already__Taken• 12 years ago

Can't the government use everything they know he has done with them to ban him entirely from the sector? Some kind of conflict or interest or just hang him with something and put out a black mark.

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

He's most likely using inside information from the NSA. This warrants an investigation and constant monitoring by DOJ (not that they'd actually do anything about it if they saw Alexander selling secret NSA information to companies).

As someone else was saying on Twitter - at least Snowden gave back the information to tax-payers for free. Keith Alexander is just trying to profit from it, and only giving it to a few elites.

TheMagicHorsey• 12 years ago

Whenever a company starts off by talking about patents, I suspect they are going to claim some trivial shit and troll everyone.

jemfinch• 12 years ago

"Alexander said that if he determines that he needs to use technology or methods that the NSA has patented, he will pay for a license".

Why can the NSA patent anything at all, preventing the public from using the technology it generated with taxpayers' money?

res0nat0r2• 12 years ago

Why not? It is just like many other companies that invent technologies that might happen to also be funded by the public. See DARPA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA

Alupis4• 12 years ago

Can I call up the NSA and obtain a license for say... XKeyScore? Probably not... so this is egregious.

raverbashing• 12 years ago

"Why can the NSA patent anything at all"

I wouldn't bother with anything they patented.

If they did that it means it's not worthy of secrecy. It's that simple.

Patents are public

datapolitical• 12 years ago

Not all patents are public, for at least some the government can file a private patent on secret tech and only have to reveal it when someone else tries to patent the same thing.

adestefan• 12 years ago

It allows the government to prove that they invented it before someone else. It protects them from patent trolls.

samstave3• 12 years ago

Why can't anyone license the public sector work of the NSA?

angersock• 12 years ago

Asked why he didn't share this new approach with the federal government when he was in charge of protecting its most important computer systems, Alexander said the key insight about using behavior models came from one of his business partners, whom he also declined to name, and that it takes an approach that the government hadn't considered. It's these methods that Alexander said he will seek to patent.

Quite the patriot--and one wonders why Millenials have no faith in the senior .gov folks.

kelvin0• 12 years ago

I'm tempted to make an analogy with 'protection' money paid by some small businesses to the mafia in order to be able to operate without being 'hassled' ... Of course, it's just subjective image that popped into mind as I read this.

616c2• 12 years ago

Alexander is believed to be the first ex-director of the NSA to file patents on technology that's directly related to the job he had in government.

I wish purely out of spite this schmuck could be the source of a whole class of new lawsuit by which certain government employees, like projects they work on, are legally required to do public domain work only. Like, their employment at a company becomes caustic so people who works at orgs like the NSA who have access to state secrets dedicate themselves to the cause for life and there is no chance for profit.

In short, this is disgusting and I dislike him more than even before.

drblast• 12 years ago

Government agencies about to be inundated with sales pitches from General Alexander's company in 3...2...1...

Same thing happened when Admiral Fallon retired and suddenly discovered his long hidden cyber security talent at NeuralIQ.

This is a way for these guys to use influence to sell things to agencies they used to run.

dublinben• 12 years ago

How can we forget Chertoff, and his lobbying/fear mongering on behalf of body scanner manufacturers. He very transparently used his credentials as former Secretary of Homeland Security to get his client's devices installed in every airport in the country.

samstave3• 12 years ago

And Tom Ridge, who joined the board of Savi Technologies/Lockheed Martin to push the use of RFID tracking on military shipments and port security.

gcb4• 12 years ago

i just read several paragraphs of absolutely nothing.

really. how this person considers himself a journalist? or even a blogger?

the central argument appears to be patents, yet not even the titles are mentioned.

pasbesoin• 12 years ago

Ok, I didn't read it. But I am of the strong opinion that what is for sale is political expertise and connections, not any particular technical expertise.

Perhaps toss in some particular narrow-band legal and program (as a human endeavor, not a technical skill) knowledge.

Most "revolving door" activity in DC centers around these areas of expertise and influence (politics, connections, legalese), as far as I have observed from my distant perch.

nanomage3• 12 years ago

I can't wait for the patent paperwork to come out. I see it just showing up in open-source security distros.

The NSA's Cyber-King Goes Corporate

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