Alexander the Geek, Cyber Caesar

You really should read his Wikipedia entry for a nice overview of the man, who was a classmate of David Patraeus at West Point. Of real interest to me was the report that as the Brigadier General in command of the Army’s component of NSA, he is the individual that decided that the military should begin hoovering up the data of US citizens after 9/11, a policy that was adopted by Lieutenant General Michael Hayden, the then Director of the National Security Agency. That makes me believe that he might be more than slightly invested in defending the process.

Apparently he didn’t feel that his horizons were broad enough at NSA, so he pushed for the creation of US CYBER COMMAND [fanfare]: The command is charged with pulling together existing cyberspace resources, creating synergy and synchronizing war-fighting effects to defend the information security environment. [That is from the Cyber Command wiki, and is sourced to its official brochure.]

The thing that people need to understand about Alexander the Geek, is that he is a West Pointer. and he knows that NSA is only worth three stars, while his new ‘venture’ [yes, he has an MBA] is a four-star position, so he is going to favor CyberCom over NSA if there is a conflict, because USCYBERCOM is the FUTURE OF WARFARE!!!!!

Digby noted that Marcy Wheeler is already hinting that the War on Cyber-terrorists™ seems to be receiving more prominence than that stodgy old War on Terror™ [that is so ‘last decade’].

Badtux alerted me to a new post by Marcy that demonstrates how serious Zero is about that ‘debate on government spying’: he appointed DNI James ‘Joe Isuzu’ Clapper to handle the review. And the man wonders why people don’t trust him …