The Cipher Brief sat down with General Keith Alexander, former Director of the National Security Agency. Alexander discussed the Paris attacks, the impact of the Snowden leaks on intelligence collection, and the trade off between privacy and security.
TCB: You were the longest-serving NSA director. During your tenure, you saw al-Qaeda at its height and witnessed the rise of ISIS. Is ISIS now a bigger threat than al-Qaeda was?
KA: I’d say ISIS is more lethal and more capable. It’s like a form of cancer and certainly the most malignant. I wouldn’t take my eye off al-Qaeda, though. I suspect the group is trying to figure out how to get back in the game.
TCB: What did you think when you heard about the Paris attacks?
KA: I thought: we saw it coming and we still couldn’t stop it. The reality is innocent people died. I remember, I got into this argument at a forum when someone said, “we need our civil liberties and privacy and if people need to die that’s ok.” I said, “That’s not ok. This isn’t a suicide pact. You can do both.”
That’s where we need to describe what those civil liberties and privacy protections are. That’s where the press needs to help the American people understand how it’s protected and how it’s used. Senator Rand Paul says, “They’re listening to our phone calls, they’re reading our emails,” — that’s factually incorrect, but it gets him votes. That’s wrong. And he’s been hammered for it recently, and he should have been, because I think he knows he’s deceiving the public for his own benefit and it impacts our country. We need to set that right.
TCB: Do you see any change in ISIS’ approach? Conventional wisdom was that ISIS was about territory, about a Caliphate, and that was going to attract foreigner fighters to ISIS. ISIS has lost some of its territory. Has that impacted its strategy in terms of launching attacks against the West?
KA: It absolutely has. There are two parts: one, the sensationalism of the attack shows that it has the credibility to do it, and those who want jihad have a place to go. And two, of greater concern, is what happens over the next few weeks in France. For instance, will there be hate crimes against Muslims? And if there are, that will be bad for the West and good for ISIS because ISIS will be able to show that it is not the one attacking innocent Muslims; so they win twice. France is going to be hard-pressed to stifle those hate crimes, particularly when you look at what happened after Theo Van Gogh in November 2004; there have been around 300 hate crimes since that.
The Cipher Brief: Let’s talk a little bit more about terrorism in the post-Snowden era. In reference to the Paris attacks, CIA Director Brennan said there are more plots “in the pipeline.” Do you think the Intelligence Community’s hands are tied when it comes to getting the information that would help stop these kind of attacks?
Keith Alexander: I think we need to look at the impact leaks has had on collection overall. You need to go back to August 1998, when it was revealed that we knew Osama bin Laden was responsible for the East Africa embassy bombings because of satellite communications. After that disclosure, we never caught Bin Laden on a satellite phone again. From that point, it took 13 years to find him.
Now jump to Snowden revealing everything. If you just look at the data that came out and how it was used, the majority of that collection was used for counterterrorism. The majority of what we did at NSA was go after terrorists. Of course, there was other collection. But if you look at the volume of collection in support of counterterrorism and military operations, it’s an order of magnitude more than anything else. That’s what Snowden directly impacted.
Describing in the press how we collect gives the terrorists an opportunity to step back and say, “Now how do we get around that?” And they’re going to find a way to do that successfully. The reality is we’ve lost valuable intelligence and people’s lives are at risk. We’re going to have to think of novel approaches to collecting information to protect our people and our allies. And that’s not easy.
TCB: If there are more Paris-style attacks, either in Europe or here in the U.S., will the pendulum shift back toward giving the NSA more authorities to keep people safe?
KA: I think it swings back and forth. I think we need to be completely transparent about what we are doing to the full extent we can. We have the opportunity now while we aren’t under attack to get it right. So we should take that time and do it right.
TCB: And when you mean get it right, you mean strike the balance between authorities and privacy?
KA: Here’s what I would do. I would sit down with terrorism analysts and say, “Ok, why didn’t you get that? What is it going to take to stop that? Where did we fail as a community? Why didn’t we have the collection systems in place? Is it a law? Is it money? What is it?” Most of our system really is a reflection of what we see with what’s called [Section] 702 [of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act]. That collection allowed us to go after terrorists talking in the United States. Well, the terrorists now know we don’t go after U.S. carriers, so they adjust accordingly. So we have to get better.
