Gen. Keith Alexander: The Banality of Evil

Dear Mr. President,

Until this week, Gen. Keith Alexander was a blank to me. I knew he headed the NSA and that he lied to Congress but little more. Bland and nondescript, he’d go unnoticed in a crowd. Then I read a post by Glenn Greenwald (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/15/nsa-mind-keith-alexander-star-trek) about an article in the journal, Foreign Policy, that described Alexander’s “all-out, barely-legal drive to build the ultimate spy machine…willing to play fast and loose with legal limits.” What caught my eye, however, was that he hired a Hollywood set designer to redesign his “Information Dominance Center” as an exact replica of the bridge of the starship Enterprise complete with whooshing doors and the captain’s chair commanding the room. I thought, this guy’s a clown, but a few days later I ran across an article in the July Wired magazine called “The Silent War” by James Bamford which went into detail about Gen. Alexander and I changed my mind: this guy may be a clown but he’s a scary clown. His obsession with “information dominance”—the collection and analysis of all data, the constant search for plots—reminded me of Ahab’s megalomania in pursuit of the White Whale. Alexander’s organizing skills and ability to fund his ever-expanding empire—despite sequestration—are amazing. (An NSA official said, “We jokingly refer to him as Emperor Alexander, because whatever Keith wants, Keith gets.”) The article documents his work with the CIA on Stuxnet, the computer worm designed to destroy Iran’s centrifuges; his warrantless wiretapping under Bush and deceptions to Congress; his persecution of Thomas Drake, an NSA whistle blower; his command of military intelligence teams responsible for abuses at Abu Ghraib; and his relentless push to “get it all”—every electronic click and call by everyone everywhere. What came to mind now was Hannah Arendt’s “the banality of evil” from her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem. She characterized Eichmann as “a mediocre bureaucrat…‘not a monster’ but ‘a clown.’” Today, in the September 23 New Yorker (“Unholy Alliances,” Pankaj Mishra) I read another Arendt observation, this time of the U.S. in 1971. In her introduction to the Pentagon Papers, she asserted that “American machismo had weirdly supplanted all strategic and military aims and interests. The U.S. had to behave like the greatest power on earth for no other reason than to convince the world of it.” The past is present and evil remains banal even in America.