By Poornima Gupta
ASPEN, Colo., June 29 (Reuters) – Former National Security
Agency director Mike McConnell, who now works for defense
contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, said people employed to sift
through classified government data should not have solo access
to the information.
McConnell, a Booz Allen vice chairman, was making
one of his first public comments since former U.S. spy agency
contractor and Booz Allen employee Edward Snowden revealed the
agency’s top-secret monitoring of phone and internet data.
Speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival on Friday, McConnell
said he supports a proposal made by NSA chief General Keith
Alexander.
“One of the things General Alexander has proposed is that a
systems administrator, like this most recent leaker, any time he
is having a level of access he enjoyed, it’s a … two-person
control,” he said. “You can’t do it alone. You have to have a
partner.”
Snowden, an American citizen who is wanted by the United
States on espionage charges and is seeking asylum in Ecuador, is
currently in a transit area of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport,
according to Russian officials. He arrived in Moscow last Sunday
from Hong Kong.
He fled the United States to Hong Kong in May, a few weeks
before publication in the Guardian and the Washington Post of
details he provided about the communications surveillance
programs.
The leaks have raised questions about the government’s use
of more than 480,000 contract workers who have top-secret
security clearances. Booz Allen is a major American defense
contractor.
McConnell, who began his career as a U.S. Navy intelligence
officer and went on to lead the NSA from 1992 to 1996, defended
the partnership between the government and private sector.
“Everything we use is made in the private sector – chips,
airplanes, submarines, ammunition – it’s all manufactured in the
private sector,” said McConnell, who also served as director of
national intelligence from 2007 to 2009.
“So there is some element of bringing the best and brightest
of the free market – innovation, creativity, new ideas – and to
equip those of us in the military or whatever function we have
in government to carry out our duties in the most productive
way,” he said.
“If you take away the ability of the government to harness
the private sector, you would do serious harm to our collective
interest,” McConnell added.
