>'What insights or expertise about cybersecurity could possibly justify such a sky-high fee, some wondered, even for a man as well-connected in the military-industrial complex as the former head of the nation's largest intelligence agency?'
The same sort of insights and expertise that athletes put into stuff sold by Nike, Adidas or Gatorade.
I think it's a little more than an endorsement deal. He knows deep inside information into what surveillance programs the NSA operates. I read it as follows: "we guarantee your company's IT infrastructure will no longer be seen as a low hanging fruit to the NSA"
He's not a clueless career bureaucrat. He's been in the cybersecurity business for a very long time (from his Wiki page):
> Alexander worked on signals intelligence at a number of secret National Security Agency bases in the United States and Germany. He earned an MS in business administration in 1978 from Boston University, an MS in systems technology (electronic warfare) and an MS in physics in 1983 from the Naval Postgraduate School, and an MS in national security strategy from the National Defense University.
While the government is often woefully behind the private sector, it's also sometimes several steps ahead.[1] You might not like his views about the right balance between security and privacy, but I wouldn't underestimate the kind of insight Alexander can bring to the table, for reasons that have nothing to do with his political pull with the NSA.
[1] Anecdote: I worked on a DARPA project about a decade ago. Commercial implementation of similar technology is probably another decade out. And that was pretty run of the mill stuff, nothing classified. I can only imagine the type of shit you run into at the NSA. The military often just hits a particular pressure point before the private sector does, and they have the money to throw experts at the problem.
I remember watching as a kid a History Channel documentary on the NSA, or maybe encryption in general, with the name or theme at least "The Code Breakers and the Code Makers." Essentially, it ended with the observation that the NSA was in trouble: as advantage by the end of the 20th centry shifted from code breaker to code marker, and non-commerical and free encryption tools of higher quality than ever made government-sponsored code breaking many orders of magnitude harder than before.
As a budding nerd, I was thankful for this. HC painted the NSA as being painted into a corner, and even then I wondered for a moment what this would mean for them. Little did I know a decade later how angry the result would make me, and perhaps the exposure of the Clipper Chip was just some ironic leak so they could laugh at later successes.
I have no doubt he's smart, but taking from your comment that in this arena, govn't software is often years ahead of private sector software, I don't for a single minute believe his patents are for technology he magically invented "on his own time."
I know the article tries to address this, but his "unique insight" can never (especially this soon) be separated from his knowledge of classified information and software techniques.
I'm a contracter at an internet company in Palo Alto. If i pulled this, there is a lot of paperwork that says.. profits go to parent company..... 100% of my time is to be on said project. I just assume Director of NSA would have the same line.
>'I think it's a little more than an endorsement deal.
Sure.
He's quite educated, decorated, extremely experienced and I don't doubt there's legitimate product/services ready to be sold.
That's not really the question though.
It's how much distance there is between whatever the highly educated, experienced, pre-eminent security consultants not named Keith Alexander are paid and $1M per month. It's also a matter of who is willing to pay that much and why.
Who's the last high-ranking military officer who left the US military to join the industrial part of the military-industrial complex to get arrested for using classified information in their new job?
The same sort of insights and expertise that athletes put into stuff sold by Nike, Adidas or Gatorade.
It's an endorsement deal.