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?