Daunting Tests Await Admiral Named N.S.A. Chief
WASHINGTON — It is not hard to understand why veterans of the National Security Agency argue that 2013 was the worst year since Harry S. Truman got the place running 62 years ago.
It started with Edward Snowden’s leaks of stolen N.S.A. documents and ended with a holiday letter to families of agency employees declaring that despite what everyone was hearing on television and reading in the papers, their relatives were heroes, not violators of privacy rights. In recent weeks it has gotten tougher. President Obama has moved from lukewarm defenses of the agency’s programs to embracing recommendations to take the bulk collection of telephone call records out of its hands.
Google and Yahoo say they are equipping themselves with new technologies designed to defeat N.S.A. interception, and the general counsel of Microsoft blogged not long ago that “government snooping potentially now constitutes an ‘advanced persistent threat,’ ” a phrase normally used to describe China’s most sophisticated hackers. And to stop leakers, the agency plans to step up monitoring the calls, emails and financial transactions of agency employees, a move the N.S.A.’s privacy critics find particularly rich in irony.
The man chosen by Mr. Obama to navigate this bureaucratic, political and public relations disaster is Vice Adm. Michael S. Rogers, who on Tuesday will face members of the Senate at his confirmation hearing, an event not likely to be accompanied by the thunderous applause that greeted Mr. Snowden in Texas. Friends of Admiral Rogers in the intelligence community, who have worked with him in his current job running the Navy’s Fleet Cyber Command, say they wonder whether he has a sense of what he is wading into.
“Why would anyone in his right mind be director of N.S.A. right now?” asked John R. Schindler, a former N.S.A. officer who is now a professor at the Naval War College. “It’s a massive political headache.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/11/world/admiral-set-to-face-confirmation-to-lead-nsa.html?hp&_r=2
