Senior NSA official moonlighting for private cybersecurity firm

© Felix Clay/The Guardian

The National Security Agency has developed close ties with certain private cybersecurity businesses.

The former director of the National Security Agency has enlisted the US surveillance giant's current chief technology officer for his lucrative cybersecurity business venture, an unusual arrangement undercutting Keith Alexander's assurances he will not profit from his connections to the secretive, technologically sophisticated agency.

Patrick Dowd continues to work as a senior NSA official while also working part time for Alexander's IronNet Cybersecurity, a firm reported to charge up to $1m a month for advising banks on protecting their data from hackers. It is exceedingly rare for a US official to be allowed to work for a private, for-profit company in a field intimately related to his or her public function.

Reuters, which broke the story of Dowd's relationship with IronNet, reported that the NSA is reviewing the business deal.

Since retiring from the NSA in March and entering the burgeoning field of cybersecurity consulting, Alexander has vociferously defended his ethics against charges of profiting off of his NSA credentials. Alexander was the founding general in charge of US Cyber Command, the first military command charged with defending Defense Department data and attacking those belonging to adversaries. Both positions provide Alexander with unique and marketable insights into cybersecurity.

His final year as the agency's longest serving director was characterised by reacting to Edward Snowden's disclosures - and the embarrassment of presiding over the largest data breach in the agency's history - and publicly urging greater cybersecurity cooperation between the agency and financial institutions.

"I'm a cyber guy. Can't I go to work and do cyber stuff?" Alexander told the Associated Press in August.

Alexander, whose adult life was spent in uniform, intends to file patents for what he has described obliquely as a new forecasting model for detecting network intrusions. His assurance prompted speculation that the retired general is profiting from technical sophistication that competitors who do not have a US intelligence pedigree cannot hope to replicate.

Alexander portrayed Dowd's unusual joint positions with the NSA and IronNet as a way for the public to keep benefitting from Dowd's expertise, while saying less about how Alexander will profit from the same skill set.

"I just felt that his leaving the government was the wrong thing for NSA and our nation," Alexander told Reuters.

The NSA, whose operations are almost entirely secret, has long been criticised for its close corporate ties. One long-serving official, William Black Jr, left the agency for Science Applications International Corporation, before returning in 2000 as deputy director.

While Black was in his senior position, SAIC won an NSA contract to develop a data-mining programme, called Trailblazer, that was never implemented, despite a cost of over $1bn . Whistleblowers have charged that Trailblazer killed a more privacy-protective system called ThinThread.

Black, however, did not serve simultaneously at the NSA and SAIC.

Compounding the potential financial conflicts at the NSA, Buzzfeed News reported that the home of chief of its Signals Intelligence Directorate, Teresa Shea, has a signals-intelligence consulting firm operating out of it. The firm is run by her husband James, who also works for a signals-intelligence firm that Buzzfeed News said appears to do business with the NSA; and Teresa Shea runs an "office and electronics" business that lists a Beechcraft plane among its assets.