MIRROR, MIRROR:
The bridge of the Starship Enterprise, NCC-1701-D, which the
National Security Agency reportedly based its Information Dominance
Center's design on.
NSA director Keith Alexander might be the most famous spy in
America right now.
Everyone wants to know who's really behind the agency's widespread
snooping. And now a lengthy profile of Alexander in Foreign Policy
invites even more intrigue.
It also reveals some of the general's weird ways.
The core questions raised about Alexander the "cowboy" in the FP
story stem from revelations in Edward Snowden's leak of
confidential NSA documents earlier this summer. "Cowboy" doesn't
quite cut it, though. Alexander sounds
a bit more eccentric than that:
"When he was running the Army's Intelligence and Security Command,
Alexander brought many of his future allies down to Fort Belvoir
for a tour of his base of operations, a facility known as the
Information Dominance Center," a retired officer in charge of VIP
visits said.
"It had been designed by a Hollywood set designer to mimic
thebridge
of the starship Enterprise from Star Trek,
complete with chrome panels, computer stations, a huge TV monitor
on the forward wall, and doors that made a "whoosh" sound when they
slid open and closed.
"Lawmakers and other important officials took turns sitting in a
leather "captain's
chair" in the center of the room and watched as
Alexander, a lover of science-fiction movies, showed off his data
tools on the big screen.
"Everybody wanted to sit in the chair at least once to pretend he
was Jean-Luc
Picard."
Well that's odd, but it doesn't explain his decisions as NSA
director.
Why, for instance, did Alexander expand the NSA's purview
withprograms like
PRISM that flirted with the line between what's
legal and what's not?
The general did it because he believed that big data and technology
could protect the nation. That's not such a bad thing to believe
in!
However, sometimes Alexander's approach can be very
misleading. For
example:
"He had all these diagrams showing how this guy was connected to
that guy and to that guy," said a former NSA official who heard
Alexander give briefings on the floor of the Information Dominance
Center.
"Some of my colleagues and I were sceptical. Later, we had a chance
to review the information. It turns out that all [that] those guys
were connected to were pizza shops."
Another official remembered a chart that Alexander had drawn up to
identify all of the terrorists in Afghanistan. When they checked
the research, they found no evidence of terrorist activity and
discovered that a quarter of the targets on Alexander's list were
already dead.
Well hey, even
powerful people make mistakes. Surely, Alexander
surrounded himself with level-headed folks who can give him a good
gut check every now and then. You'd think that his most trusted
lieutenant, James Heath, would be the one. But
no. Heath
is kind of crazy:
"Several former intelligence officials who worked with Heath
described him as Alexander's 'mad scientist.' Another called him
the NSA director's 'evil genius'," a former intelligence official
said.
"For years, Heath, a brilliant but abrasive technologist, has been
in charge of making Alexander's most ambitious ideas a reality;
many of the controversial data-mining tools that Alexander wanted
to use against the NSA's raw intelligence were developed by Heath,
for example.
"He's smart, crazy, and dangerous. He'll push the technology to the
limits to get it to do what he wants."
So the director of the NSA is a trekkie?
And his right hand man is an 'evil genius'?
And that replica of the Enterprise bridge was built with taxpayer
dollars? OK then.
If you're still curious about Keith Alexander, check out the
Alexander profile in full. Spoiler: The general's favourite iPhone
game is Bejeweled Blits.
-Gizmodo
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On screen !
