Post date: Jun 12, 2013 8:48:17 PM
National Security Agency chief Keith Alexander tells lawmakers that U.S. surveillance efforts have stopped dozens of potential attacks.
WASHINGTON D.C. UNITED STATES (JUNE 12, 2013) ( POOL) - The director of the National Security Agency said on Wednesday (June 12) that recently disclosed top-secret U.S. surveillance programs have helped to prevent "dozens" of potential terrorist events.
NSA chief General Keith Alexander made the comments at a U.S. Senate panel hearing when asked if the intelligence community could estimate how much the agency's broad monitoring of phone call and Internet data had helped prevent a terror attack."I gave an approximate number to them in a classified, but it's dozens of terrorist events that these have helped prevent," he said.
This was the NSA's first public testimony since the revelations of the surveillance programs.
Alexander briefed some senators behind closed doors on Tuesday. He said that the system needs to be "looked at" after Edward Snowden's disclosures about theNational Security Agency's broad monitoring of phone call and Internet data from big companies such as Google, Verizon and Facebook Inc.
"The access that he had, the process that we did, and those are things that I have to look into and fix, from my end and then across the Intel community Director (of National Intelligence James) Clapper said 'we are going to look across that as well'. I think, those absolutely, need to be looked at. I would point out that in the IT arena, in the cyber arena, some of these folks have tremendous skills to operate networks. That was his job for the most part from the 2009-2010 as an IT, system administrator, he had great skills in that area," Alexander said.
The hearing was focused on the United States' cybersecurity preparation, and not the NSA's communications monitoring.