It's just as important to understand his motivation as it is to understand ours, and assess the reasonableness of each in comparison to the other, comparing our current situation to others in history that were similar, and the result they had.
And secondly, is not the motivation to stop terrorists in the US from harming US citizens a noble goal, in theory? Now granted, we shouldn't have to sacrifice our privacy to get that done, but it's not like Keith Alexander is trying to harm the US. He wants to help, and depending on who you ask, may be misguided, on the money, or completely wrong in how he plans to help.
It'd be more useful to correct than to abolish, because abolishment of the NSA and it's surveillance programs is never, ever going to happen, nor should it. ZERO surveillance (this might be arguable, I suppose) results in US citizens dead on US soil. Unacceptable.
Agree with you on the charicterization going on here, its one thing to feel his motivations are a given way, another to imply he has public made statements indicating this to be fact.
Do you have information on this or do you keep on stating your opinion as fact?
http://w2.eff.org/Privacy/Key_escrow/Clipper/nsa.charter
I'm not interested in getting into an emotional mud-slinging contest with you.
You are wrong to suggest that he believes that there is an imminent threat to American government itself from Islamists living in the USA. Some people do believe this, but he is not one of them, based on his own words.
"Terrorists driven by a desire to 'create a caliphate' of sharia law in the middle east continued to plot attacks. 'Terrorists live among us,' he said"
GP conflates these statements to imply that those among us want to create Sharia or whatever among us, but Alexander did say the words.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/31/nsa-keith-alexa...
I'd like to add,
The Gulf States are already under Sharia, and have been since their founding almost a century ago. The Taliban copied Saudi Arabia, even using the exact same names for bureaucracies. [2] Relations with them were excellent before 9/11.
[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_for_the_Promotion_of_....
But, as Iraq showed, there's no need to understand elementary facts about their culture before you invade and engage in a massive social engineering project, or engage in an global, eternal, "war on terror".
I can guarantee you that the people who directed the Iraq Wars knew full well the elementary facts about their culture before invading and engaging in a (partially) global war on terror. They know that you can't win a war against a technique, and they know that going to war in these areas attracts terrorists who want to fight against you. The only question was where the game board was going to be placed, and that question was answered over 20 years ago.
It was only in the portrayal to the taxpayer and the invaded that these were left as unknowns.