The head of the U.S. National Security Agency sees the work of his authority as a worldwide benchmark. Courts, Congress and government look at what we do, the intelligence chief and leader of the U.S. Cyber troops said at the Black Hat conference, a major IT security conference in Las Vegas. This is a standard for other countries.

As director of the National Security Agency, General Keith Alexander has overseen the development of programs (also known as XKeyscore) that routinely collect records of U.S. phone calls and provide access to data held by Internet companies like Google, Facebook and Microsoft.

Alexander defended the retention of telephone data in the U.S. and espionage abroad as legitimate and necessary in the fight against terrorism. Thirteen terrorist attacks in the U.S., 25 in Europe, five in Africa and eleven in Asia were prevented by the programs initiated by the US government.

XKeyscore provides the technological capability, if not the legal authority, to target even US persons for extensive electronic surveillance without a warrant provided that some identifying information, such as their email or IP address, is known to the analyst, The Guardian reported.

In its most prominent public event since PRISM–the NSA’s controversial document filtering programs, which revealed the existence of large-scale monitoring–Alexander gave new details about how to control access to the data collected within the NSA. These measures, combined with congressional oversight and the courts, represent a strong protection against abuse.

“[The programs’] reputations are tarnished because all the facts aren’t on the table. I believe it’s important for you to understand what [agents] have to do in order to do their jobs to defend this nation and the oversight regime that we have with the courts, with Congress, and with the [Obama] administration. I think you need to understand that in order to get the full understanding of what we do and what we do not do,” he said.

Public opinion and policy on the activities of the NSA is generally unfavorable after some leaks demonstrate that existing laws are being used to enable the collection of data to a previously unimaginable scale.

Seeks Hacker Support for Data Collection

Alexander wanted to change the public perception of the US government a bit. He explained that, before a given phone number can be added to a list that is used to search the database, only 22 people within the agency are authorized to do so. Once given the go ahead, just 35 NSA analysts are allowed to do research, he added, noting that in 2012 the agency gave the nod to investigate the 300 call records of phone numbers, and only 12 reports were made to FBI, containing less than 500 numbers.

He further stated that the NSA actively seeks hackers to help in the programs as they are the largest concentration of technical talent in the world. Alexander called upon the Black Hat community to make suggestions on how they could do their jobs better and perhaps with less adverse consequences.

“How do we protect our civil liberties and privacy?” he asked. “This is one of the biggest issues we face today.”

The hacker Alex Stamos said in an interview in advance that the hacking community will probably like to work because of Prism & Co. in the future with less authority.

Alexander spoke less how to control access to emails and other data collected from Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and other U.S. Internet companies, but left implicit protection systems are similar. The NSA has technology to audit that records everything they do people with access to the surveillance databases, he explained, so anyone acting suspiciously would be caught.

Alexander’s claims appear to be diametrically opposed to those of Edward Snowden, who leaked material on the two monitoring programs in June this year.

Alexander insisted that the efforts of NSA surveillance were motivated by the need to combat terrorism, and stated that their programs on Internet phone had prevented 54 terrorist activities, 13 of them on U.S. soil.

Jeff Moss, hacker and founder of the Black Hat conference, welcomed the willingness of the director of the NSA to speak publicly and provide some new details, though scarce-about how programs operate.

“Since the details of these programs are classified, we have to get everything we can from this debate” while public attention remains focused on the NSA, said Moss. He argued that the more we know about the NSA program, the more likely to develop better control systems: “Can we come up something that technologically enabled to do [monitoring], but does not compromise privacy”.

For Alexander, at the Black Hat conference, he donned on a shirt and faded jeans to encourage hackers gathered to consider the possibility of working for the NSA. (Perhaps before he attempts to change hackers’ perception of the NSA, he should think about his perception of hackers.)