At the end of 2005, the director of the National Security Agency (NSA), Keith Alexander, insist on a radical plan aimed at stopping terrorist attacks from Iraq that killing and hurting over 10 U.S. citizens per day. He wanted all Iraqi messages, phone calls or e-mails pass through agency computers. “Instead of looking for a needle in a haystack, better gather all hay, label it and keep it. So we have the whole time, “said a senior U.S. intelligence official.
Data collection plan called “Real Time Regional Gateway” should have play an important role in destroying insurgent networks in Iraq and significantly reduce deaths from improvised explosive devices. This project also includes Alexander’s controversial approach to keep Americans from imminent threats: terrorism and destructive electronic attacks, writes “Washington Post”.
In eight years since at the head of NSA, Keith Alexander presided quietly, a revolution of capturing information in the name of national security. Just as it did in Iraq, Alexander wanted everything: tools, resources and authority to collect and store huge amounts of raw information from national or foreign communications.
Alexander is driven by the knowledge that there are serious threats facing the U.S. These threats include foreign and even local terrorists, including a wide range of opponents who frequently tested electronic defense of the country, looking for opportunities to steal secrets or unleash chaos by destroying critical infrastructure. Like many of his generation officials responsible for national security, Alexander sensitivities were modeled by “painful” leakage of the secret services such as those that led to the attacks of 11 September 2001, continues “Washington Post”.
For critics of Alexander, Edward Snowden’s revelations confirmed suspicions of a Security Agency director so in love with the power of technology that was able to sacrifice right to private life. “He’s obsessed and willing to get everything” said Thomas Drake, a former NSA official which he revealed classified information about this agency. “Continuation of Alexander’s policies will result in the complete evisceration of our civil liberties” he continues.
“Believe with certainty that you have to collect everything you can within the law, and that includes some pretty aggressive interpretation of the law” said Timothy Edgar, a former security officer at NSA and the White House. But Alexander has supported the view in a speech in June, saying it is able to do anything to protect civil rights and privacy. “We all know that people will die if you give up an activity that is so important to the defense of this nation” Alexander said in his speech.
General Keith Alexander has become slightly easier, the most powerful general in the U.S. Americans not heard, at least until the scandal Snowden not propelled into the limelight. He leads the largest, most expensive and most secret security agency in the world: an organization whose existence was not even acknowledged in the beginning. NSA takes precedence at all “listening” from abroad, from routine spying on foreign governments to research communications of foreign terrorists. Many of these interceptions are made breaking through networks of other countries, saying “Washington Post”.
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