‘Spying foiled terrorist plot’

‘It’s dozens of terrorist events that these have helped prevent, from my perspective,’ said Gen Keith Alexander, US cyber commander and director of National Security Agency, at a Congressional hearing on Thursday.

Responding to questions from senator Pat Leahy, Alexander said, ‘NSA collects millions of records of which dozens prove critical. This includes both domestic and foreign terrorist plots.’ However, Alexander refrained from elaborating further.

‘I want American people to know we’re trying to be transparent here, protect civil liberties and privacy but also the security of this country. The Zazi case in New York started with 702 sets of information based on operatives overseas. We saw connection to a person in Colorado and passed the information to FBI which  determined who it was. 

‘Phone calls to Zazi then allowed us to use the business records, FISA, and find out connections between Zazi and other players, specifically in New York City,’ he said.

Alexander further explained, ‘When I say dozens, what I mean is the authorities complement 

each other in helping us identify different terrorist and disrupt them. He said in light of the real and growing threats in cyberspace, US needs a strong Pentagon role. ‘While we feel confident that most foreign leaders believe a devastating attack on a critical US infrastructure and its population by cyber means would elicit a prompt and proportionate response. It is possible, however, that some regime or cyber actor could misjudge the impact and the certainty of our resolve.

‘In particular, we are not yet deterring the persistent cyber harassment of private and public sites, property and data. Such attacks have not caused loss of life, but they were destructive to both data and property in other countries. The remote assaults last summer on Saudi Aramco and RasGas, for example, rendered inoperable and effectively destroyed the data on-more than 30,000 computers.