NSA director faces hackers and hecklers head-on at speech

The Director of the National Security Agency (NSA) faced hecklers head-on Wednesday during a speech at a prominent cyber-security conference in Las Vegas, telling hackers in the audience that he remains unapologetic about surveillance programs used by the federal government.

"Read the Constitution!" one audience member shouted at Gen. Keith Alexander during his keynote address at the Black Hat conference, a prominent annual gathering for hackers and cyber experts which drew about 7,000 attendees this year from the private and public sectors.

"I have. So should you," the 61-year-old four-star general shot back, triggering sustained applause.

Alexander has been under fire from many civil liberties advocates and lawmakers since former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked documents revealing previously secret telephone and internet surveillance programs run by the government spy agency.

Snowden, facing U.S. criminal charges and holed up in Russia, disclosed details of the PRISM program, describing how the NSA gathers and stores telephone calling records of virtually all Americans, and works closely with Google Inc, Microsoft Corp and other technology companies to obtain communications from users in other countries.

His most recent disclosures, published by the Guardian on Wednesday, the same day as Alexander's scheduled speech, reveal the existence of another secret surveillance program, XKeyscore, which allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, chats and browsing histories of millions of individuals.

Snowden provided the training manual for the program to the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald. The NSA refers to the program as its "widest-reaching" system for gathering intelligence from the internet. 

"The latest revelations make clear that the government's surveillance activities are far more extensive and intrusive than previously understood, and they underscore that the surveillance laws are in desperate need of reform," Jameel Jaffer, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said in a statement. “These documents also call into question the truth of some of the representations that intelligence officials have made to the public and Congress over the last two months."

"Intelligence officials have said repeatedly that NSA analysts do not have the ability to sift indiscriminately through Americans' sensitive information, but this new report suggests they do," he added.

Because information on so many Americans is subject to collection without any suspicion of wrongdoing, Snowden's revelations have provoked a large public outcry.

The NSA works with some of the companies represented at the conference and even hires their best employees. At the same time, many security experts have profound enthusiasm for the causes of internet freedom and privacy.

"I've never sensed this level of tension or apprehension in the community," said Black Hat founder Jeff Moss. He recalled the debate over U.S. restrictions on cryptography exports in the 1990s, but said that "pales in comparison" to the fight about mass communications interception now underway.

Alexander's comments in Las Vegas did not go beyond those he previously gave before Congress and at other public appearances in the past two months. He argued that the NSA surveillance programs helped disrupt more than 50 "terrorist-related" plots, but said he supported wider discussions on how to balance national security priorities with privacy rights.

Alexander, who is also in charge of the U.S. Cyber Command that handles military cyberspace operations, said the NSA initially examined only several hundred phone numbers, then looked outward to see who else those people had spoken to.

His tone was mostly conciliatory, though he asserted that allegations of indiscriminate eavesdropping by the NSA had not been borne out by a Senate committee investigation, internal audits or reviews by administration officials.

"We get all these allegations of what they could be doing, but when people check, like the intelligence committee, they found no times" that NSA internet surveillance had been willfully abused, he said.

He insisted that the NSA does not listen to specific phone calls or read emails.

Brad Antoniewicz, a 31 year-old security researcher who attended the conference, was not fully convinced that access to information is only authorized in certain circumstances, arguing that "if someone decides to query the system, without authorization, then that is a big issue. I still don't understand how collecting so much information from so many people is allowed," he said.

"I understand his position but I think the majority of citizens hold their privacy in high regards and that value seems be getting ignored."

Earlier Wednesday, the U.S. government released some declassified documents with broad redactions on the NSA's mass collection of telephone data for the sake of "transparency." 

The documents included an April order by the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that directed Verizon to hand over data from millions of Americans' telephone calls and described how it should be stored and accessed. 

The documents were released in anticipation of Wednesday's Senate hearing on surveillance. Senior intelligence officials testified before the Senate Judiciary committee, where they fielded questions about the NSA's controversial surveillance programs.

Al Jazeera and wire services