In the last few months I’ve had several opportunities to meet with General Micheal Hayden, former Director of NSA and CIA. A collection of stories and views who came out in those meeting, the ones he agreed to go on the record with, are published today by Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel largest daily and YNET, its website.
The interview itself is long, and somewhat surprising. For your benefit, I highlighted some quotes I thought might be of special interest:
“The Snowden affair is as if we have come into the movie theater very late in the movie and we’re seeing almost the denouement of the film in the headline of the media… we have absolutely no intention of using the information of the 1.5 billion people who have downloaded the game. If they’re stupid enough to download Angry Birds, we’re going to jump on that link going back to the Angry Birds starship”
* * *
“We’re not mad at Angry Birds, and we’re not trying to defend the universe from Angry Birds. Although you might want to consider defending yourself from Angry Birds. If you aren’t paying for the app, you aren’t a customer, you’re the product.”
* * *
“NSA had to make some decisions, we could either sit there and say ‘stop, stop, I don’t want this stuff coming’, or you can turn around and start swimming with it. We turned big data from the enemy to the friend.”
* * *
“We spent about the gross domestic product of a Central American country to catch the communications coming out of Moscow going out to the ICBM fields in Soviet Asia… The 21st WMD proliferators, drug traffickers, transnational crime individuals. There is no way protect you from dangers without touching the data stream in which your personal communications are located.”
* * *
“American industry has been unfairly singled out because of Snowden. Now everyone is focused on to what extent Facebook is or isn’t passing information to NSA. But American industry only offers the United States intelligence community the same legal and legitimate assistance as any other industry in the western world.”
* * *
“How do I explain how someone so young, and frankly without a great deal of
experience, could have done something so seemingly sophisticated, and my hypothesis is, well, maybe somebody helped him.”
* * *
“I went to President Bush and I said: ‘We’ve got to act. Although we no longer have the ability to capture, we have got to take these people off the battlefield, one way or the other.'”
* * *
“Israel is probably the only other country in the world who thinks like the United States – that targeted killings are legal. I think it’s legal, I really do it. but we don’t have a friend in the world who thinks targeted killings are legal other than Israel.”
* * *
On targeted killings: “The level of intelligence to do what the United States has done can only be described as exquisite. This is magnificent intelligence. The campaign against the tough core of al-Qaeda along the Afghan-Pakistan border is an absolute classic. Those guys are no longer capable of hurting anyone”.
* * *
“There’s still part of me that thinks that the German rage was not legitimate, because everybody does it. But after Munich, I have no doubt that the German anger was authentic. We Americans didn’t appreciate that the Germans view privacy the way we Americans view freedom of religion and freedom of speech.
* * *
On President Obama Promise to Chancellor Merkel:” “It was a very personal no-spy agreement. It was, ‘we will not intercept your phone’. It made no mention of against the Federal Republic, the office of the chancellor or her successor or the vice chancellor.”
If any of those caught your interest, like they have mine, you are welcomed to read the full article on this link.:
https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4570076,00.html
Image Credits: MCT