As I noted earlier today, last year Keith Alexander’s CyberCommand forces got their asses handed to them by civilians in a cyber war game.
“They were pretty much obliterated,” said one Capitol Hill staffer who attended the exercise. “The active-duty team didn’t even know how they’d been attacked.”
Nevertheless, here is one of the things he told Ken Dilanian in his second “exclusive” interview attempting to explain why he should get rich in the private sector capitalizing on 9 years of fear-mongering about cyber.
“If I retired from the Army as a brain surgeon, wouldn’t it be OK for me to go into private practice and make money doing brain surgery?” he asked. “I’m a cyber guy. Can’t I go to work and do cyber stuff?”
Alexander’s story has changed a bit since his last attempt to explain himself, to Shane Harris. The number of patents he’ll get expanded from 9 to 10.
His firm is developing as many as 10 patents, he said, and has secured contracts with three clients he declines to name.
And he claims — after apparently not challenging the underlying $1 million a month claim to Harris — that his rates were always overblown.
Reports of his firm charging $1 million a month for consulting services are not accurate, he said, though he declined to disclose his firm’s fees.
“That number was inflated from the beginning,” he said.
But that’s not the best bit. In addition to revolving door shadow regulator Promontory Financial Group (which goes unmentioned in both stories) and the Chertoff Group, Dilanian reveals who gave Alexander the advise he could get rich off serving the last 9 years in a top national security position: Someone who spent those same years in a top national security position.
Lawyers at NSA and his private lawyers— including former FBI Director Robert Mueller, now with the Wilmer Hale law firm in Washington — have told him he is on firm legal footing, Alexander said.
These exclusives are all well and nice, but both of them ignore the reports about Alexander serving as the lead to set up a public-private partnership between the banksters and the national security state to infringe our privacy in order to keep the banks safe (heck neither mentions his known contract with SIFMA).
Until exclusives actually ask Alexander about the known thrust of this program, they’re going to help his credibility no more than the exclusives with the same journalists explaining NSA spying did.