Cowboy of the NSA

On Aug 1, 2005, Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander reported for duty as the 16th director of the National Security Agency, the United States' largest intelligence organization. He seemed perfect for the job.

Under Alexander’s watch, the breadth, scale, and ambition of its mission have expanded beyond anything ever contemplated by his predecessors. The NSA was already a data behemoth when Alexander took over. In 2007, the NSA began collecting information from Internet and technology companies under the so-called PRISM program. In essence, it was a pipes-bending operation. The agency has collected so much information that it ran out of storage capacity at its 350-acre headquarters at Fort Meade. At a cost of more than $2 billion, it has built a new processing facility in the Utah desert, and it recently broke ground on a complex in Maryland. There is a line item in the NSA's budget just for research on "coping with information overload." Yet it's still not enough for Alexander, who has proposed installing the NSA's surveillance equipment on the networks of defense contractors, banks, and other organizations deemed essential to the US economy or national security. Alexander cast himself as the ultimate defender of civil liberties, as a man who needs to spy on some people in order to protect everyone. But those who've worked closely with Alexander say that lately he has become blinded by the power of technology. And now, for the first time in Alexander's career, Congress and the general public are expressing deep misgivings about sharing information with the NSA or letting it install surveillance equipment.