06.23.14
For Hire: Cyber Guardian for Banksters
Continuing with the issue of retired NSA director Keith Alexander almost immediately going to work as a million dollar security consultant to the 1 percent, a bit from today’s International Business Times:
“He’s already out pushing hard,??? an anonymous industry source told Politico. “He’s cleared. If something does pop, he can get in the door and get a briefing. That’s part of his stock and trade.???
For all of Alexander’s expertise, though, there are still questions over whether his fee ($1 million per month) is simply too much, even for firms that have so much to lose.
Now notorious for building the US cyber-war machine, Alexander also developed offensive operations to weaken security on the global networks while creating a growing market for malware and unreported vulnerabilities. He takes all his taxpayer-paid for expertise and pull as an information/reputation commodity to be sold to Wall Street and the 1 percent.
An expensive commodity, at that.
How does anyone but Keith Alexander’s consulting firms and the 1 percent in US and global banking who may take his services benefit from any of it? They don’t.
But there’s no money or will in doing anything for anyone or anything below that level, anyway. Cynically, if you protect the financial system and its titans you’re protecting only the stuff and people worth protecting.
Alexander was always going to go where a story he has been developing for years, that catastrophic cyberattacks were coming to the US financial sector, to those too big to fail, has fallen on the most willing and able to pay corporate ears.
Continued from the IBT:
Others have been less welcoming to Alexander’s foray into the private sector. To Bea Edwards, the executive and international director of the Government Accountability Project, Alexander seems to be saying that his decades’ worth of knowledge from the world of classified information is available to the highest bidder.
“In the person of Keith Alexander, we’re seeing the de facto merger of corporate financial power and government outreach … “Some subset of corporations is paid to develop the cyber-attack and defense capability of the U.S. government, and another subset pays the graduations of the contracting agencies (the NSA and USCYBERCOM) for an inside route to the technology.
Edwards refers to the synergy in which cyber-defense contractors like the firms that hired Edward Snowden, Booz Allen, or the Lockheed Martins, provided leased workers, at no deal for the taxpayer, to staff Alexander’s cyber-war machine-building operation. And then, in turn, once retired from government work, he leases himself to the top in corporate America.
That’s a helluva retirement.