Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Ars Technica has been covering former NSA director Gen. Alexander's retirement to the private sector. As has Congressman Grayson.

Ars Technica links here, here, here, and here.

Grayson's letter inquiries, here.

Bloomberg. Slate.

Reuters reports of a Senate Intelligence Committee concern.

I expect the General expected lesser levels of scrutiny while cashing in his chips, and likely blames his being scrutinized as Snowden's fault, and not at all his own.

This link, this quote:

He oversaw a workforce that studied cyber-attacks and cyber-defenses, often drawing on highly classified or privileged information. So it struck many observers as suspicious that, immediately upon retiring, he suddenly had a dramatically better solution to a pressing national-security problem, one he never introduced while in government but planned to patent and sell. Had he withheld a valuable security solution to profit from it later? Were the novel approaches he intended to patent developed on the public dime? Alexander claimed that his part of the relevant work was done in his spare time, while other cyber-defense solutions were developed by his partner outside government.

No one could prove that those explanations were lies.

But they smelled fishy, especially because even as Alexander created the appearance of multiple improprieties as he entered the private sector, the NSA refused to release the statements of financial conflicts of interest that he'd filed as a federal employee. Indeed, the NSA refused to release the financial-conflict forms of any of its employees, despite the fact that they were required by public-records laws to do so.