The former head of the NSA, Keith Alexander, has been getting into trouble for charging companies millions of dollars to tell them how to keep his former employers out of their systems.
The argument is that he is using all the material he gathered at the NSA to make a nice little earner in retirement. If he were a whistle-blower, they would lock him up, but since he is an adviser to corporates and is not giving out military operations details he can do what he likes.
However we think that the security community and the Senate is being a little hard on Keith, after all if a patent application is correct he is clearly a programming genius.
In the six months since he left the NSA, Alexander has come up with brand new anti-hacking concept that will have shedloads of patents. The former NSA chief said that IronNet has already signed contracts with three companies and that he hopes to finish testing the system by the end of September.
Now he could not have come up with that idea when he was at the NSA, because he would have been expected to use it for his job and to help his country, which is more or less what he was paid for.
This means that he had to come up with it after he left office in March. This means he not only wrote the code managed to make it work. This makes him a software genius and an organisational wiz-kid who displays skills we have not seen in a former military man.
In an interview to the Associated Press he said that if he retired from the Army as a brain surgeon, it be OK for him to go into private practice and make money doing brain surgery.
“I’m a cyber-guy. Can’t I go to work and do cyber stuff,” he asked. But he’s not. In the Army, he just managed “cyber guys.”
His system involves “behavioural modelling” as its secret sauce. The technology has been looked at by security experts but so far no one has got it go. Well other than Alexander which shows what sort of genius he must have been.
