Keith Alexander
Overexposed artwork photos - Original photo
Keith seems excited for this selfie taken by Corrie Becker, a mysterious
acquaintance of his whom he shares no apparent social connection with. He has
his neck tucked into his collar and an awkward smile plastered across his face.
He and Corrie appear to be close and intimate, having
fun with the selfie. The location where this photo
was taken and how these two met each other is unclear. Corrie
stated on her Facebook post, “Look who takes a great #Selfie
- General Keith Alexander, the Cowboy of the NSA.”
The photo was obtained from Facebook via Corrie
Becker's
account. Dated May 27
th, 2014.
[1]
Keith Brian Alexander served as Director of
the National Security Agency (NSA) until 2013 and is now a retired four-star
general. He was also Chief of the Central Security
Service (CHCSS) and Commander of the U.S. Cyber Command. Alexander held key
staff assignments as Deputy Director, Operations Officer, and Executive Officer
both in Germany and during the Persian Gulf War in Operation Desert Shield and
Operation Desert Storm. He also served in Afghanistan on a peacekeeping mission for the Army Deputy
Chief of Staff for Intelligence. In Saudi Arabia he
presided over the Navy’s 10th Fleet, the 24th Air Force, and the Second Army.
Among the units under his command were the military intelligence teams involved
in torture and prisoner abuse at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison.
[2]
Two years later, Donald Rumsfeld appointed Alexander director of the NSA.
In 2001, Alexander was in charge of the Army
Intelligence and Security Command with 10,700 spies worldwide. When he became
NSA director he added 14,000 Cyber Command personnel, including Navy, Army, and
Air Force troops. NSA peers jokingly referred to him as “Emperor Alexander”
[3]
and "cowboy"
[4]
for breaking legal limits to dominate the terrain. Alexander’s bravado is reflected in the sci-fi design of his operations base,
a facility known as the Information Dominance Center in Fort Belvoir, Virginia.
The media described this base as a war room modeled “after Star Trek’s
Enterprise."
[5]
To deny illegally monitoring American
citizens’ phone calls and emails, Keith B. Alexander lied several times to
legislators and the press. The first case occurred in March 2012 during a U.S.
congressional hearing in response to questioning by Representative Hank Johnson
concerning allegations made by former NSA officials as to whether or not the
personal digital information collected on American citizens was mendacious;
Alexander insisted that the NSA does not collect such data.
[6]
In July 2012, in response to a question posed by a member of the press as to whether
a large data center in Utah was used to collect data on American citizens,
Alexander again stated, "No. While I can't go into all the details on the
Utah data center, we don’t hold data on American citizens.”
[7]
During the same month, DEF CON founder Jeff Moss
[8]
asked him a question related to NSA file-keeping on U.S. citizens. Alexander
responded by claiming that the NSA absolutely does not keep data and that,
“anybody who would tell you that we're keeping files or dossiers on the
American people knows that's not true."
[9]
Keith Alexander's regard for secrecy was
noticeable in 2006, when senior NSA employee Thomas Drake released an interview
about Trailblazer, one of Alexander’s inefficient programs. In response,
federal prosecutors charged Drake with 10 felony counts and up to 35 years in
prison; this occurred despite the fact that all of the information Drake was
alleged to have leaked was not only unclassified and already in the public
domain.
In 2014, Keith B. Alexander funded his
consulting firm, IronNet Cybersecurity.
With this firm, he offered his security expertise, including his, “new
technology, based on a patented and unique approach to detecting malicious
hackers” to the banking industry for a $1 million fee per month.
[10]
In response, congressman Rep. Alan Grayson sent a letter to the Security
Industries and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) to inform them that Keith
Alexander might attempt to sell classified information and technology that he
had access to during his career at the NSA.
[11]
Keith Alexander’s
quote:
“In
the United States, we would have to go through an FBI process, a warrant […]
and serve it to somebody to actually get it [the information]. […] We don’t
have the technical insights in the United States […] you have to have something
to intercept or some way of doing that, either by going to a service provider
with a warrant or you have to be collecting in that area. We’re not authorized
to collect nor do we have the equipment in the United States to actually
collect that kind of information.”
[12]
John Brennan
Overexposed artwork photos - Original photo
John is shown here at The OSS Society,
presumably during an ongoing or post-conference talk at the William J. Donovan
dinner. With his mouth gracelessly open, the most controversial CIA figure of
the last two decades appears preoccupied with an unfinished sentence.
The photo was obtained from Facebook via OSS
Society. Dated October 29
th, 2014.
[13]
John Owen Brennan is the current Director of
the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and has spent 25 years with the agency to
date. Brennan became Deputy Executive Director of the CIA in March 2001 under
George W. Bush. He has served as chief counterterrorism advisor to U.S.
President Barack Obama; his official title was Deputy National Security Advisor
for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, and Assistant to the President.
As director of the CIA, John Brennan is
responsible violating several human rights and international laws. While in
office, he has presided over mass levels of surveillance, the hacking of global
communication networks of allies, secretive drone attacks condemned by the UN,
as well as the brutal torture of suspects without trial at secret prisons
organized through extraordinary rendition flights outside of U.S. jurisdiction.
Brennan and the CIA were also accused of
hacking into the computers of U.S. Senate employees in order to surveil the release of the Intelligence Committee report on
the CIA’s detention and interrogation program. John Brennan lied when he
insisted that the CIA had not improperly accessed the computers of Senate
staffers investigating the agency’s role in torturing detainees. Later, an
internal investigation confirmed that the CIA had truly hacked the Senate’s
computer network, and Brennan was forced to apologize to Senate Intelligence Committee
members by affirming that the CIA had spied on the Senate Panel. In July 2014,
two senators of the Intelligence Committee demanded Mr. Brennan’s resignation
because of his false testimony and unconstitutional spying on Congress
[14]
.
John O. Brennan also repeatedly lied about
the civilian casualties caused by the highly secretive drone program
[15]
which for years had neither been disclosed to the press nor
to U.S. government oversight committees. Several civil liberties and human
rights groups have attempted to force transparency in this regard. For
instance, in March 2015, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a
disclosure lawsuit for a secret so-called Kill List for drone strikes
[16]
.
In February 2013, Senator Lindsey Graham estimated that the drone program had killed
4,700 people;
[17]
this statement is in direct contradiction to Brennan’s June 2011 claim that
U.S. counterterrorism operations had not resulted in "a single collateral
death."
[18]
In March 2015, Brennan announced the creation
of a new division called the Directorate of Digital Innovation, which will
handle the CIA’s cyber-operations, taking on the responsibilities of two
existing directorates: the Open Source Center and the Information Operations
Center. The former monitors social media, while the latter conducts
cyber-penetrations and attacks. Brennan’s creation marked a major overhaul of
the agency’s organizational structure, and ended the traditional separation
between spies and analysts. With the creation of ten new mission centers,
Brennan claims that he “will bring the full range of operational, analytic,
support, technical, and digital personnel and capabilities.” According to
Brennan, the new digital directorate would have significantly more leeway than
both its predecessors. He told reporters: “What we need to do as an agency is
make sure we’re able to understand all of the aspects of that digital
environment.”
[19]
John Brennan’s quote:
“As
far as the allegations of the CIA hacking into Senate computers, nothing could
be further from the truth... We wouldn’t do that. I mean, that’s just beyond
the, you know, the scope of reason in terms of what we do.”
[20]
James Clapper
Overexposed artwork photos - Original photo
James looks uncharacteristically happy to be
surrounded by nature. This is a mysterious photo with an unknown source that
was leaked on cryptome.org and circulated in the hacker community. Founded in
1996, Cryptome.org was the first leaking platform created for the publication
of prohibited, secret, and classified documents. It contains more than 70,000
files, including grisly photos of American soldiers slaughtered during the Iraq
War. The tweet accompanying this photo describes Clapper in the following words:
"A rare photo of US Masterspy James Clapper
smiling."
The
photo was obtained from Twitter; however, the source remains unknown. Dated
December 3
rd, 2013.
[21]
James Robert Clapper is the current Director
of National Intelligence (NI); from 1992 to 1995, he served as Director of the
Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). While teaching at Georgetown University, he
was nominated by President George W. Bush to be Under Secretary of Defense for
Intelligence (USDI).
The political timeline reveals Clapper's
consistent insincerity in his false testimony on NSA surveillance programs;
this has resulted in several lawsuits brought against him. Clapper was sued for
the warrantless wiretapping program in the case, Amnesty International vs.
Clapper
[22]
,
in which ultimately, the Supreme Court held that the plaintiffs did not have
standing to challenge the constitutionality of the NSA’s program. The case, Amnesty
v. Clapper, was filed in 2009 on behalf of a broad coalition of attorneys
and human rights, labor, legal, and media organizations whose work requires
them to engage in sensitive and sometimes privileged telephone and email
communications. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), enacted by
Congress in 1978 following the abuses of the 1960s and 70s, regulates the
government’s conduct of intelligence surveillance inside the United States. It
generally requires the government to seek warrants before monitoring Americans’
communications. In 2001, however, President Bush authorized the National Security
Agency to launch a warrantless wiretapping program and in 2008, Congress
ratified and expanded that program, giving the NSA almost unlimited power to
monitor Americans’ international phone calls and emails
[23]
.
In December 2013, just a few months after Snowden’s revelations, Clapper was
sued in the case, American Civil Liberties Union v. James Clapper
[24]
.
This case challenged the legality of the NSA's bulk phone metadata collection
program. On December 27
th 2013, the court dismissed the case, ruling
that metadata collection did not violate the Fourth Amendment of the U.S.
Constitution
[25]
.
In March 2013, while under oath and serving
as the Director of National Intelligence, Clapper gave false testimony to the
Senate Intelligence Committee. Citing the keynote speech given by NSA Director
Keith B. Alexander at the 2012 DEF CON, Senator Ron Wyden asked Clapper to
confirm or deny: "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions
or hundreds of millions of Americans?" Clapper responded, “No sir [...]
Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect,
but not wittingly
[26]
.”
On June 6
th 2013, Director Clapper released a statement admitting
that the NSA collects telephony metadata on millions of Americans’ telephone
calls. In early 2014, a group of congressmen wrote a letter to President Obama requesting
James Clapper’s resignation, indicating that he misled Congress about the
extent of the NSA's surveillance activity
[27]
.
Edward Snowden would later reveal in an
interview in Moscow that his decision to leak classified documents was also
motivated by Clapper’s lies to Congress: “Sort of the breaking point was
seeing James Clapper [was] directly [lying] under oath to Congress. Seeing that
really meant for me there was no going back
[28]
.”
A few months after Snowden’s revelations, Clapper banned intelligence employees
from any kind of unauthorized contact with reporters
[29]
.
On March 10
th 2015 Wikimedia filed a lawsuit against Clapper over
the large-scale search and seizure of Internet communications
[30]
.
James Clapper’s quote:
“What
I said was, the NSA does not voyeuristically pore through U.S. citizens'
emails. I stand by that.”
Later
on: “My response was clearly erroneous.”
[31]
David Petraeus
Overexposed artwork photos - Original photo
David appears comical but with a thin veil of
obvious unease over his face. Lighthearted and insincerely friendly, Petraeus stands next to Yannis
Yortsos,
Dean of the
Viterbi
School of Engineering at the University of Southern California. They are in a
post-conference socialite gathering where the all of the top elites rub
shoulders. Petraeus is referred to by his friends as “Peaches,” which is a
military cultural turn of its own. Petraeus is an
avid jogger and also a survivor: of a bullet wound to the chest and an
accidental fall from a parachute.
[32]
The photo was obtained from Dean
Yortsos’ Twitter account. Dated
March 26
th, 2013.
[33]
David Howell Petraeus
served as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from 2011 until his
resignation in 2012. Petraeus took charge of
multinational forces in Iraq in 2007, after four years of filling various
command roles in the country, including combat roles. He was placed in charge
of United States Central Command in 2008, and became commander of the
International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan two years later. General
David Petraeus - who coincidentally, was in the same
class as Keith Alexander at the United States Military Academy at West Point -
called upon an array of fellow West Point graduates to rewrite a document that
would end up changing the war: the Counterinsurgency Field Manual 3-24.
Military academics consider this manual an internal form of insurgency.
Petraeus’s
downfall began the moment it was disclosed that he leaked classified information
to the woman with whom he was having an extramarital affair. Petraeus admitted to improperly retaining a number of bound
notebooks (so called “black books”) and sharing them with his lover and
biographer, Paula Broadwell. The notebooks contained
“classified information regarding the identities of covert officers, war
strategy, intelligence capabilities and mechanisms, diplomatic discussions,
quotes and deliberative discussions from high-level National Security Council
meetings, and with the President of the United States of America.”
[34]
Petraeus initially lied to FBI investigators on October
26
th 2012, telling them in an interview at CIA headquarters that he
had never provided Broadwell with classified
information
[35]
. Petraeus received more media attention for his sexual
affair and less backlash for his constant transgressions against human rights
in his position as general during the Iraq invasion. Whistleblower Thomas Drake
pointed out that the plea deal offered to former CIA director Petraeus was nothing but a slap on the wrist
[36]
.
This claim was made even clearer by the 2015 settlement in which Petraeus received a nominal $100,000 fine, two years
probation and zero prison time
[37]
.
After the scandal, in January 2012, Paula Broadwell
published her book, All In: The Education of General David Petraeus
[38]
.
Interestingly enough, the general was also spied on by the
NSA and much of the information concerning his extramarital affair was obtained
from what the agency had covertly discovered.
David Petraeus’s
quote:
“Items
of interest will be located, identified, monitored, and remotely controlled
through technologies such as radio-frequency identification, sensor networks,
tiny embedded servers, and energy harvesters — all connected to the
next-generation Internet using abundant, low-cost, and high-power computing, the
latter now going to cloud computing, in many areas greater and greater
supercomputing, and, ultimately, heading to quantum computing.”
[39]
Caitlin Hayden
Overexposed artwork photos - Original photo
Caitlin appears gleeful in this wedding
photo, featured as a profile picture on her Facebook page. Judging by her
Facebook friend list, her company appears to consist of dubious friends
employed in war zones. She possesses an unique array
of photos, including one where she’s smiling and casually standing with
military personnel in Iraq during the United States’ illegal occupation of the
country.
The photo is obtained from Hayden's personal
Facebook account. Dated January 2
nd, 2015.
[40]
Caitlin Hayden was National Security Council
(NSC) spokeswoman until October 2014. She began working as a civil servant at
the State Department one day before September 11
th 2001. She was
also spokeswoman for the US embassy in Kabul during the first years of the U.S.
invasion of Afghanistan. Her stint at the State Department included postings in
Kuwait, Iraq, Pakistan and the United Kingdom
[41]
.
She currently works as a Senior Strategic Communications and Global Media
Relations Professional in Washington D.C.
[42]
She came to prominence after Der Spiegel’s disclosure of secret
documents that shed light on the NSA’s surveillance database of more than 120
world leaders. At first, Hayden made a false statement to the general press regarding
the clandestine operations, claiming that the NSA did not conduct spying ops on
foreign political leaders, including Chancellor Merkel. In particular in a
statement to The Intercept, she claimed that the U.S. is “not monitoring
and will not monitor the communications of Chancellor Merkel.”
[43]
However, Hayden did not deny that surveillance had occurred in the past. Then,
in a contradictory statement, she said, “We have made clear that the United
States gathers foreign intelligence of the type gathered by all nations.”
[44]
It wasn't only Chancellor Angela Merkel's mobile phone that was on the NSA's
target list; German media reports claim the US spy agency also tapped Gerhard Schröder's phone calls in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War. Caitlin
Hayden would later tell Der Spiegel
that “no
such data collection took place.”
[45]
On another occasion, in dismissing James Clapper’s false testimony to Congress,
Caitlin Hayden said in an email statement that Obama has "full faith in
Director Clapper’s leadership of the intelligence community. The Director […]
made clear that he did not intend to mislead the Congress."
[46]
Caitlin
Hayden is particularly active on social media, posting frequently on her personal
Facebook and Twitter accounts; she also uses LinkedIn and has hundreds of
contacts with government employees. She currently presents herself on Twitter
as “Former Obama NSC Spox and recovering national
security wonk. Extremely energetic Alabama football fan.
Re-tweeting does not necessarily equal endorsement.”
[47]
Caitlin Hayden’s quote:
“I
can tell you that our intelligence activities are focused on the national
security needs of our country. [...] We do not give intelligence we collect to
US companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their
bottom line."
[48]
Avril Haines
Overexposed artwork photos - Original photo
Avril
is captured flustered and awkwardly mid-sentence at The National Organization
of Gay and Lesbian Scientists and Technical Professionals’ Out to Innovate
conference. The photo appears to be taken by an amateur photographer; the
quality and angle is unprofessional and obviously unflattering on Haines who is
normally seen impeccably dressed and behaved in public.
The photo is obtained from an Affinity blog
post from a conference in Atlanta at the Georgia Tech Hotel. Dated November, 2014.
[49]
Avril
Dannica Haines is the current White House Deputy
National Security Advisor. She previously served as Deputy Director of the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA), the first woman to hold that position at an agency
that is still dominated by men. Prior to her appointment to the CIA, she served
as Deputy Counsel to the President for National Security Affairs in the Office
of White House Counsel. Her term as CIA Deputy Director coincided with the global
surveillance disclosures, the CIA hacking into the computers of U.S. Senate
employees, and the release of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report on
CIA torture.
[50]
Haines was also Obama’s direct advisor on the
controversial Targeted Killings, or as it is more commonly known, the Kill
List. She worked closely with CIA Director John Brennan on the new targeted killing policy and a wide array of highly
complicated and legally sensitive issues, including covert operations, drone
strikes and espionage on foreign countries and companies. According to a 2013 Newsweek, profile which appeared just as
she was about to assume her position at CIA, one of the people she could expect
to come up have to work with at the agency was the mysterious chief of the
CIA’s counterterrorism center known only as “Roger,” the first name of his
cover identity, who has presided over the drone program for years. Haines also
worked on reducing the backlog of over six hundred secret agreements with a
number of countries in Eastern Europe allowing the CIA to set up black sites to
hold and harshly interrogate suspected terrorists.
[51]
Haines is regarded by many as a liberal pragmatist
when it comes to national-security law and is not uncommonly an advocate of
military restraint.
[52]
Avril
Haines became the subject of increased media attention when she was appointed
to her position at the CIA for having hosted erotic literature readings at a
Baltimore bookstore-cafe that she ran together with her husband during the 90s
between college and law school
[53]
.
Speculation and gossip in the media marks the uncontrollable personal
information that is permanently irremovable from the Internet.
Avril
Haines’s quote:
“Everything is
a nail and we’re a hammer.”
[54]
Michael Rogers
Overexposed artwork photos - Original photo
Mike appears to be tired yet struggling to
beam in this selfie. He is seen next to a young and
eager soldier at the military-oriented Flyin’ Irish
Basketball Tournament. John
Dean
tweeted this selfie in March with the caption:
"Admiral Michael Rogers, director of the NSA. He had an awesome message
here at @TheFlyinIrish tournament. @NSA_PAO."
The photo was obtained from Twitter via @
jjdean94. Dated March 1
st,
2015.
[55]
Michael S. Rogers has served as Director of
the National Security Agency (NSA), Commander of U.S. Cyber Command, and Chief
of the Central Security Service since April 3
rd, 2014. Prior to
that, Rogers served as Commander Navy’s 10th Fleet and U.S. Fleet Cyber
Command. During the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, Rogers joined the military’s
Joint Staff, which works for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, specializing in
computer network attacks with responsibility for all of the Navy’s cyberwarfare efforts. As such, Rogers was the first
restricted line officer to serve as a numbered fleet commander and the first
Information Dominance Warfare (IDC) officer to achieve the rank of vice admiral.
He was appointed Director of the NSA after
the Snowden revelations in 2013 and worked to expand its operations. Rogers
succeeded General Keith B. Alexander, who served as the NSA director for nine
years. Although the NSA directorship does not require Senate approval, Rogers
needed to be (and was unanimously) confirmed by the Senate to head United
States Cyber Command.
Rogers is working to build a force of 6,200 cybersecurity experts to combat a growing variety of cyber
threats. The Cyber Command, created in 2010, plans to have 133 teams in
operation by the end of 2016. In March 2015, in a plea to lawmakers for
consistent funding, Michael Rogers complained that cyber warriors are being
“gobbled up” by the private sector and other government agencies.
[56]
Rogers also views cybercrime as an economic threat, citing between $100 billion
and $400 billion worth of intellectual property lost to theft each year and regards
copyright law as a Department of Defense concern. During a tense exchange that took
place at a cybersecurity conference held by the New
America Foundation between Michael Rogers and Alex Stamos
(Yahoo! Inc.’s Chief Information Security Officer), Rogers essentially sidestepped
the question as to whether companies like Yahoo! should
grant foreign governments access to customers’ encrypted data through unsecure
backdoors that the NSA would set up in the manner the US government wants.
[57]
In a post-conference discussion with
CNN’s journalist Jim Sciutto, Michael Rogers was
asked if the NSA had ever collected communications of metadata information
about himself. Rogers stated, “We need a court order,” which is not the case
according to Snowden’s revelations. Rogers then admitted that the NSA would not
have to inform the target of their surveillance about their eavesdropping
activities.
[58]
Michael Rogers’s quote:
“Snowden clearly believes in what he’s doing.
I question that; I don’t agree with it. I fundamentally disagree with what he
did. I believe it was wrong; I believe it was illegal.”
[59]
James Comey
Overexposed artwork photos - Original photo
James is fairly well-known
for his pleasant disposition before cameras; in most of his photos, he’s
plastered with a perennial smile. However, in this photo, Comey
is reclined in his seat and exhibiting a borderline depressed energy. Adrian
Garcia, Harris County Sheriff from Texas, tweeted this photo with the caption:
"Met the new FBI Dir. James Comey who visited
Houston today. Area law enforcement leaders met w/him as well!"
The photo was obtained from Adrian
Garcia's Twitter account.
Dated October 25
th, 2013.
[60]
James Brien Comey,
Jr. is the seventh and current director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI). He previously served in President George W. Bush's administration as United
States Deputy Attorney General, the second-highest ranking official in the
United States Department of Justice (DOJ). With George Bush’s support, Comey was responsible for Machiavellian changes in the
national surveillance programs and in the prosecution of intelligence leaks. As
Deputy Attorney General in 2003, Comey appointed his
close friend and former colleague as Special Counsel to head the CIA leak grand
jury investigation. Later in 2006, he refused to "certify" the
legality of central aspects of the NSA program. In 2005, Comey
left the DOJ and he became General Counsel and Senior Vice President of
Lockheed Martin, the largest arms-producing and
military services company and he was also on the London-based board of
directors of HSBC Holdings bank.
[61]
His position on citizen privacy is grounds
for concern, given the amount of privacy-invasive policies that he supports.
For example, in a public speech at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC
in October 2014, he rebuked Apple and Google for the further development of
smartphone encryption
[62]
.
However, Mr. Comey appeared to have few answers for
critics who have argued that any portal created for the FBI and the police
could also be exploited by national or foreign intelligence agencies, as well
as by cyber criminals. In March 2015, during the House Appropriations
subcommittee hearing on the FBI budget for the upcoming fiscal year, Comey was again critical of new encryption features by
Apple and Google. His rationale against the case of encryption constantly cites
crimes against children
[63]
.
In March 2015, he described a hypothetical father asking, “My daughter is
missing. You have her phone. What do you mean you can’t tell me who she was
texting with before she disappeared.” In another
public speech against encryption, he cited four criminal cases involving minors.
However, in the three cases The Intercept was able to examine, cell phone
evidence had nothing to do with the identification or capture of the culprits
and encryption would not even remotely have been a factor.
James Comey’s
quote:
"What concerns me about this is companies marketing
something expressly to allow people to place themselves beyond the law. […] I
get that the post-Snowden world has started an understandable pendulum swing
[…] This is an indication to us as a country and as a
people that, boy, maybe that pendulum swung too far.”
[64]
Michael Hayden
Overexposed artwork photos - Original photo
In this photo, Mike appears with a false
smile in an almost desperate attempt to create a public-friendly image on
social media. The picture was taken by Max Barnett in 2008 when
Hayden was still Director of the CIA and while Barnett was supposedly a student at George
Washington University. In a comment on this picture, Max stated the following:
“Didn't think it was possible, but this picture proves the Central Intelligence
Agency can literally get surveillance right up my nose.”
The photo was obtained from Max Barnett’s Facebook account.
Dated September 2008.
[65]
Michael Vincent Hayden was Director of the
NSA from 1999 to 2005, former Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence,
and Director of the CIA from 2006 until 2009. Currently, he is a retired United
States Air Force four-star general. It was during his tenure as NSA Director
that he oversaw the extremely controversial surveillance of technological
communications between ordinary citizens in the United States and so-called
terrorist groups; this resulted in increased and warrantless surveillance
policies. Hayden introduced outside contractors and restructured management at
the NSA, persuading many old managers to retire.
In May 2006, USA Today reported that
Hayden took extreme measures to enhance NSA activity, including wiretapping
domestic communications. Hayden repeatedly defended the NSA’s secret warrantless
domestic eavesdropping program (which he helped design) to the Senate. During
his nomination hearings, he defended his actions to Sen. Russ Feingold and
stated that it was legal under Article 2 of the United States Constitution to
conduct breaches of privacy in the interest of national security, overriding
the legislative branch statutes forbidding warrantless surveillance of domestic
calls, which included the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)
[66]
.
Hayden is also responsible for Trailblazer,
[67]
a project with a large information technology component that even NSA staffers
criticized for not including privacy protections for citizens and for being a
waste of money. Hayden is also responsible for lobbying President George W.
Bush to allow the CIA
[68]
to conduct drone strikes purely on the basis of behavior that matched a
so-called “pattern of life” that can be determined through automatized analysis
of metadata by algorithms, without any concrete evidence or accurate
investigations.
Hayden is particularly known in the media for a
photo that was taken by a progressive activist who happened to overhear one of his
phone calls. While Hayden was on the Acela train that runs between Boston and
D.C., loudly giving an anonymous phone interview after the revelation that the
NSA tapped 35 world leaders’ phones, Tom Matzzie
eavesdropped and live-tweeted the conversation.
[69]
Allegedly, as soon as Matzzie's tweets went online,
the NSA contacted Hayden and instructed him to cease his phone conversation as
others were 'spying' on him. Hayden then found Matzzie
and took a selfie with him on the train ride. Matzzie exposed the whole episode to mainstream media as
well as in his tweets.
[70]
Another
interesting photo that has circulated widely online is a portrait of Edward
Snowden next to Michael Hayden. Both men are smiling, during a gala in 2011. In
late 2013, Hayden called Snowden a “defector,” adding that he believes Snowden
is “a troubled young man - morally arrogant to a tremendous degree - but a
troubled young man.”
[71]
Michael Hayden’s quote:
“Folks
at NSA decide if it is reasonable or not to include the U.S. identity. They are
usually very conservative, forcing intelligence consumers to formally request
unmasking, a process that can be time-consuming. It was an approach that, if
continued in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, would certainly protect NSA from
future bloggers, but would be less effective in protecting America.”
[72]
Michael Hayden’s quote on CIA torture:
“Punches
and kicks are not authorized and have never been employed.”
[73]
Michael Hayden’s quote on targeted killings:
“We kill people based on metadata”
[74]
Footnotes:
[1]
Corrie
Becker:
“Look who takes a great #Selfie - General Keith
Alexander, the Cowboy of the NSA.” Facebook, May 27
th, 2014.
[33] Dean Yortsos. Twitter, March 26
th,
2013.
[55]
@jjdean94. Twitter. March 1st
2015.
[60]
Adrian Garcia.
Twitter, October 25th, 2013.
[65] Max Barnett
for State Representative. Facebook.
[70] The photo was originally taken by Jeremy
Johnson on an Acela ride on the upper
East Coast. It was posted on Twitter with the caption: "This has been the
most interesting @Acela ride of all time. Yes, Michael Hayden just sat down
with @tommatzzie and
I[.]"
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