NSA Director Keith Alexander may have chosen the wrong outfit for his keynote speech at this year’s Black Hat conference.  Instead of wearing his official uniform, he should have brought a riot shield to fend off agitated attendees.

Alexander started by explaining that what they did was for the benefit of the people, to keep them safe, but in doing so, civil liberties and privacy may have been overlooked and that’s what he is asking from the hacker and security research community – a way for them to work together to be able to keep everyone safe without sacrificing the two.

About a half-hour into his talk, one attendee shouted “Freedom!” to which Alexander responded, “Exactly.  We stand for freedom,”

The heckler, who has been identified a Jon McCoy shouted, “Bullshit!”

“Not bad,” Alexander said, as applause broke out in the crowd. “But I think what you’re saying is that in these cases, what’s the distinction, where’s the discussion and what tools do we have to stop this.”

“No, I’m saying I don’t trust you!” shouted McCoy.

“You lied to Congress. Why would people believe you’re not lying to us right now?” another voice in the crowd added.

“I haven’t lied to Congress,” Alexander responded, visibly tensing. “I do think it’s important for us to have this discussion. Because in my opinion, what you believe is what’s written in the press without looking at the facts. This is the greatest technical center of gravity in the world. I ask that you all look at those facts.”

Lost appeal

Aside from appealing to the Black Hat attendees, he stated that he would answer all questions directed at him, to the fullest extent, but without jeopardizing the nation’s defense.

He also reiterated how NSA cryptologists were risking their lives for the sake of keeping Americans safe from terrorists, but their efforts have gone unnoticed and the NSA’s reputation tarnished with Edward Snowden’s unceremonious leaks.  He added that though they did gather data from people, those data were not used inappropriately or abused.  Pertinent data were used arrest Najibullah Zazi, a person involved in the 2010 New York subway bombing.

“We get all these allegations of what [NSA staff] could be doing,” Alexander added. “But when people check what the NSA is doing, they’ve found zero times that’s happened. And that’s no bullshit. Those are the facts.” The crowd responded to that line with loud applause, as Alexander asked the press not to quote his swearing, noting his 15 grandchildren.

A dangerous game of outburst

“The whole reason I came here was to ask you to help you to help us make it better,” said the general. “And if you disagree with what we’re doing, you should help us twice as much.”

Before Alexander ended his speech, McCoy shouted, “Read the constitution!”

“I have. So should you,” responded Alexander to another round of applause.

So what caused McCoy’s sudden outburst?

“His speech was pretty canned,” said McCoy. “It’s anything you can see on Fox News any day. ‘We’re in danger, we have to get rid of your freedom to keep you safe.’”

“Everyone’s thinking this, but no one’s saying it public, so everyone thinks they’re alone,” he said. “Ninety-eight percent of society has issues with this…But no one speaks up.”

SiliconANGLE Contributing Editor John Casaretto commended Alexander’s effort at becoming more transparent with what NSA has been doing with people’s data, but his effort still leaves people wondering if we are now left to choose between keeping our privacy or being safe.

“I think that’s certainly the big issue there.  As much as I dislike disagreeing with a guy who appears to be on the fringe there, my personal belief is that I’m against this massive scale of data collection, particularly when it comes to US citizens without a warrant and violating certain rights and things like that, but it does come back to the safety vs. freedom,” Casaretto says during an appearance on yesterday’s Live NewsDesk Show with Kristin Feledy.

“But that’s something an argument that was decided, this was something that started a long time ago and it’s a matter for us to really try to sort that out.  We can look back to a post-9/11 world when these powers were first expanded in this way and the surveillance state really tried to take hope, and I think it’s something that we’re just gonna be looking at from here on.  This is now a reality and it’s the kind of thing we can tie back to that period of time,”  Casaretto stated.

For more of Casaretto’s Breaking Analysis on the subject, check out the NewsDesk video below:

XKeyscore’s involvement

Alexander’s plea may have been for not.  According to The Guardian, aside from PRISM, the NSA has another project called XKeyscore that allows data analysts to access all of a user’s Internet activity by using a few keystrokes and an identifier, which could be as simple as a person’s e-mail address.  All theses data are available to NSA analysts, and they can access them without a warrant.

But the NSA stated that XKeyscore is legal and that collected data are only stored a few days.  Also, the NSA claims that it is aimed at overseas targets to pinpoint communications between people online and over the phone, limited to finding mention of certain terms and names in blog posts, emails, and other shared content.  Unfortunately, Americans aren’t left unscathed as they are often swept in during the intelligence gathering.

“XKeyscore is used as a part of NSA’s lawful foreign signals intelligence collection system,” said the NSA to the Guardian. “Allegations of widespread, unchecked analyst access to NSA collection data are simply not true.”

Source: Forbes, The Guardian