At the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander got cheered and heckled on Wednesday.
The Black Hat conference is a meeting of cybersecurity professionals and hackers.
Alexander was asked to give an address at the conference before contractor Edward Snowden leaked documents about the NSA’s spy programs--including PRISM, according to CBS News.
Alexander was talking about the controversial FAA 702 program that is designed to thwart terrorism plots when he said, “We stand for freedom.”
A heckler in the audience then said, “You lied to Congress. Why should we believe you’re not lying to us?”
“I did not lie to Congress,” Alexander shot back.
Alexander even drew laughter when someone said that he should read the Constitution, reported The Associated Press. Alexander responded that he had read it, and the heckler should as well.
He said the NSA does not read e-mails or listen to specific phone calls. He insisted that it wasn’t true the agency listens to specific phone calls and reads emails.
“What comes out is we’re collecting everything. That is not true,” Alexander said, according to Wired magazine. He said the agency’s programs helped thwart 54 potential terrorist threats.
“We had intercepts of one of the 9/11 hijackers from Yemen,” he said “[But] we didn’t know because we didn’t have the tools and the capabilities to see that he was actually in California…. The intelligence community failed to connect those dots, and now what we’re doing is putting in to the existence of these programs.”
He added: “We do not see the content of your calls,” according to ZDNet.
“We have the courts, Congress and lawmakers looking at what we do,” he said, adding: “This shows you we have 100% auditability on every query we make. (...) We worked with committees in Congress for a directorate of compliance.”
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