Keith Alexander really IS a pariah

In twenty years of writing about computer and national security issues, I’ve never anyone from the top of the US military quite as grasping as former NSA director, Keith Alexander.

He’s redefined retiring from service at a whole new level.

And I know of no military men, or directors of any intelligence agency, to claim they’re going to be filing patents for security inventions after leaving their public sector jobs.

Yet here we go:

[Alexander, in an interview Monday, said he has developed] a new technology, based on a patented and “unique” approach to detecting malicious hackers and cyber-intruders that the retired Army general said he has invented, along with his business partners at IronNet Cybersecurity Inc., the company he co-founded after leaving the government and retiring from military service in March. But the technology is also directly informed by the years of experience Alexander has had tracking hackers, and the insights he gained from classified operations as the director of the NSA, which give him a rare competitive advantage over the many firms competing for a share of the cybersecurity market …

Alexander said he’ll file at least nine patents, and possibly more, for a system to detect so-called advanced persistent threats, or hackers who clandestinely burrow into a computer network in order to steal secrets or damage the network itself. It was those kinds of hackers who Alexander, when he was running the NSA, said were responsible for “the greatest transfer of wealth in American history” because they were routinely stealing trade secrets and competitive information from U.S. companies and giving it to their competitors, often in China...

http://dickdestiny.com/blog1/?p=18406 

Feinstein And Rogers Try To Scare Americans With Ooga Booga Terrorism Threats

It may be relevant that of Feinsteins' top 10 donors, 5 of them are defense contractors (General Dynamics, General Atomics, Northrup Grumman, Honeywell International, and BAE Systems). With the others being pharmaceutical and energy companies; and pro-israeli lobby group.  But that influencing her policy decisions would be a delusional conspiracy theory, right?

Source: http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/contrib.php?cycle=2014&cid=N00007364&type=C

"It appears that the heads of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees, Senator Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Mike Rogers, are recognizing that their strategy for keeping their co-dependent relationship with the NSA going is failing and that the American public and an increasingly large segment of Congress no longer believes their bogus claims. Perhaps that's because every time they open their mouths, it takes all of about an hour before many of their claims are completely debunked, if not outright mocked for obviously being bogus. So their latest strategy? To basically yell "Ooga Booga Terrorists!" as loud as they can to try to scare people based on absolutely nothing.

Feinstein and Rogers did a little dance on Sunday political TV shows insisting that "the terrorism threat is increasing" and we're all going to die if we stop trying to make sure the NSA actually, you know, respects the Constitution. Asked if we were "safer" now than a year or two years ago, Feinstein kicked off the FUD:

“I don’t think so,” Feinstein replied. “I think terror is up worldwide, the statistics indicate that. The fatalities are way up. The numbers are way up. There are new bombs, very big bombs. Trucks being reinforced for those bombs. There are bombs that go through magnetometers. The bomb maker is still alive. There are more groups than ever. And there is huge malevolence out there.”

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131201/23124625421/feinstein-rogers-try-to-scare-americans-with-ooga-booga-terrorism-threats.shtml

The Joker

Lord spare us once again from 60 Minutes whoopie cushion news of things to come, deadeningly promised and threatened for as long as I’ve been in cyberspace:

Panetta: The reality is that there is the cyber capability to basically bring down our power grid to create … to paralyze our financial system in this country to virtually paralyze our country. And I think we have to be prepared not only to defend against that kind of attack but if necessary we are going to have to be prepared to be able to be aggressive when it comes to cyber efforts as well. We’ve got to develop the technology, the capability, we’ve got to be able to defend this country.

60 Minutes has also been the go-to place if you want to make an unchallenged claim on cyberwar.

via dickdestiny.com