The NSA's Cyber-King Goes Corporate
foreignpolicy.com
foreignpolicy.com
The same sort of insights and expertise that athletes put into stuff sold by Nike, Adidas or Gatorade.
It's an endorsement deal.
> 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.
As a budding nerd, I was thankful for this. HC painted the NSA as being painted into a corner, and even then I wondered for a moment what this would mean for them. Little did I know a decade later how angry the result would make me, and perhaps the exposure of the Clipper Chip was just some ironic leak so they could laugh at later successes.
I know the article tries to address this, but his "unique insight" can never (especially this soon) be separated from his knowledge of classified information and software techniques.
This is, IMHO, incredibly perverse.
Edit: clarification.
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.
I assume any application of that information would have him arrested too.
Or was your comment sarcastic irony?
"Work for the NSA and you get will leave with a very powerful patent portfolio, and (most importantly) minimal risk of getting sued!"
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.
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.
You mean they could threaten this to get cooperation, or that they should do this?
Anyway. Yes, I think.
Why can the NSA patent anything at all, preventing the public from using the technology it generated with taxpayers' money?
Or just that he was going to use NSA patents?
Because the NSA maintains a list of patented technologies that they offer to the public on various terms: http://www.nsa.gov/research/_files/tech_transfers/nsa_techno...
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
How would this work if it were say, Krebs doing the consulting? He would not have access to secret government patents... nor should he (if the patents are supposed to be secret for "national security" purposes). Neither should Alexander.
[1]: http://cryptome.org/2013/07/snowden-spiegel-13-0707-en.htm
I'd say it's a pretty clear-cut case who was behind Stuxnet.
[1] http://www.wired.com/2013/06/general-keith-alexander-cyberwa...
Quite the patriot--and one wonders why Millenials have no faith in the senior .gov folks.
Deleted comment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora
Nope, they target anyone and everyone big. True, there are some DoD names on that list... but Nasdaq, Google, Yahoo, and Adobe are most decidedly not DoD companies.
They target anyone that has proprietary information that they can use to make money. I'm sure there are plenty of DoD targets, but these are outnumbered by private companies with no ties to the goverment.
...I'm pretty sure that award goes to the enjoyable human beings in the banking and foreclosures industries, followed only possibly by health insurance companies.
Source?
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.
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.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2011/07/15/mak...
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).
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.
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.