??? Not long from now, Keith Alexander will wrap up his career running the National Security Agency. He will be remembered as the man holding the bag when Edward Snowden decided to leak thousands of documents about the NSA’s practices. There’s nothing Alexander can do about that. ????KEITH ALEXANDER has served as head of the U.S. National Security Agency since 2005, but this year his tenure took a sharp turn with Edward Snowden’s revelations of specific NSA programs. He made various appearances at Congressional hearings this year, defending the NSA programs and the oversight apparatus for such programs. ????The director flatly denied a Washington Post report Wednesday that the NSA secretly broke into communications links to Google and Yahoo servers worldwide. ????Alexander pushed back against the report that cites leaked classified documents, saying the agency does not illegally access the servers of Internet companies. ????“The servers and everything we do with those, those companies work with us. They are compelled to work with us. This isn’t something the court just said, ‘Would you please work with them and throw data over it.’ This is compelled. And this is specific requirements that come from a court order,” Alexander said at a cybersecurity conference in Washington. ????“This is not NSA breaking into any databases. It would be illegal for us to do that. So, I don’t know what the report is. But I can tell you factually we do not have access to Google servers, Yahoo servers. We go through a court order.” ????The Washington Post report is the latest in a series of allegations that stem from disclosures given to news organizations by Snowden, the former NSA contractor who describes himself as a whistleblower. ????The operation is code-named MUSCULAR, and it is operated jointly by the NSA and its U.K. counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters, The Washington Post reported, citing the documents. ????According to The Post, the NSA and the Government Communications Headquarters are copying data flowing through fiber-optic network cables overseas, and the NSA sends millions of the records from Yahoo and Google to data warehouses at its headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. ????There is no oversight of the NSA operation because it is occurring overseas out of the reach of the court, according to the report. ????But Alexander said that was not true, and that a court order must be issued to the Internet companies. ????“We issue that court order to them through the FBI. And it’s not millions, it’s thousands that are done. And it’s almost all against terrorism and other things like that,” he said. “It has nothing to do with U.S. persons.” ????The report raised the concern of Google and Yahoo, with the Internet behemoths saying they never gave the NSA permission to access communication links to their respective servers. ????“We have strict controls in place to protect the security of our data centers, and we have not given access to our data centers to the NSA or to any other government agency,” said Yahoo spokeswoman Sarah Meron. ????Google has “l(fā)ong been concerned about the possibility of this kind of snooping, which is why we have continued to extend encryption across more and more Google services and links,” said David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer. ????“We do not provide any government, including the U.S. Government, with access to our systems. We are outraged at the lengths to which the government seems to have gone to intercept data from our private fiber networks, and it underscores the need for urgent reform.” ????The newspaper report emerged a day after Alexander and James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, testified before a House committee reviewing the agency’s surveillance activities. ????The hearing, billed as a discussion of potential changes to the 35-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, commonly known as FISA, came after a report by the German magazine Der Spiegel that the NSA monitored German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone. Some reports also suggest the United States carried out surveillance on French and Spanish citizens. ????The allegations have rocked U.S.-European relations with a number of countries calling for investigations. Germany has threatened to cut off the ability of the United States to track bank transfers associated with terror groups. ????NSA denied Tuesday that the U.S. collected telephone and e-mail records directly from European citizens, calling reports based on leaks by Edward Snowden “completely false.” ????“To be perfectly clear, this is not information that we collected on European citizens. It represents information that we, and our NATO allies, have collected in defense of our countries and in support of military operations,” Alexander said. ????As the nation’s spy chiefs testified, two ranking lawmakers from opposing parties introduced bills that call for greater transparency and oversight of the NSA’s surveillance programs. ????But during the hearing, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers said collecting foreign intelligence was important to protecting Americans and allies from terrorism. ????“Every nation collects foreign intelligence. That is not unique to the United States,” said Rogers. “What is unique to the United States is our level of oversight, our commitment to privacy protections, and our checks and balances on intelligence collection.” ????Alexander said media outlets misinterpreted documents that were leaked. He said the NSA legally collected metadata from some phone calls, and the rest of the metadata came from U.S. allies. ????He said European intelligence services collected phone records in war zones and other areas outside their borders and shared them with the NSA. ????Alexander said that in the past year the NSA collected “billions” of records from Americans under the program, but, as in past testimony, he said it was only searched by a handful of NSA officials possessing “reasonable articulable suspicion” of connection to a specified terrorist group, and searched fewer than 300 times over the past year. ????He argued that a continued threat of terrorism justified retaining the NSA’s post-9/11 powers. He and his colleagues have contended that since 9/11, they have prevented 54 terrorist plots, although under congressional pressure. ????Besides being the world’s largest intelligence agency, Alexander is also in charge of the Central Security Service, U.S. Cyber Command, the Navy’s 10th Fleet, the 24th Air Force, and the Second Army. ????A profile by the Wired magazine said Alexander built the NSA “over the past eight years by insisting that the U.S.’s inherent vulnerability to digital attack requires him to amass more and more authority over the data zipping around the globe.” ????His vision of cybersecurity boils down to putting the Internet under his personal control, according to the profile. ????Here’s a quick excerpt from the Wired profile: ????In his telling, the threat is so mind-bogglingly huge that the nation has little option but to eventually put the entire civilian Internet under his protection, requiring tweets and emails to pass through his filters, and putting the kill switch under the government’s forefinger. “What we see is an increasing level of activity on the networks,” he said at a recent security conference in Canada. “I am concerned that this is going to break a threshold where the private sector can no longer handle it and the government is going to have to step in.” ????Alexander has served as head of the NSA since 2005. He will step down next year.(SD-Agencies) | 