♪ emily: he has been dubbed of the cowboy of the nsa and spy king. a retired four star general who served multiple tours. in as the director of the national security agency are under president george w. bush, a position he held eight years during the agency's most challenging period. cybercrime he tackle

as the founder and ceo of ironnet. joining me today, former nsa director general keith alexander. general, so great to have you on the show. thank you for joining us. we have to start with the standoff between apple and the fbi. google, facebook -- tech company cited with apple. reopened a divide between washington and silicon valley. how sustainable is it for tech companies to be at odds with their government? gen. alexander: everyone has a right to one opinion. what we have to do is we have to learn how to get our country back together. best of what we represent and put that on the table. when i look at the great capabilities coming out of the tech community, these are

phenomenal, tremendous opportunities. look at your caves. the opportunities you have in -- foron, for medication medicine, for communication. there are tremendous vulnerabilities with it. forre outpacing the ability the policy community to keep up. i would not say slow down, but i would say because we have on so far so fast, how do we help the policy community keep up. this encryption issue is such a problem. communications had been encrypted the last decade, how would be will be different? gen. alexander: if you encrypt communications and the government cannot read the content, when it is authorized -- andt order to do so al qaeda terrorists in pakistan was contacting someone in colorado. itwe decide that that and

was encrypted, all we would know is that they contacted someone in the u.s. so an attack on the new york city subway may have happened if can medications had been encrypted and you would not be able to intercept them. gen. alexander: that is correct. emily: how can the government and silicon valley work together for the better? gen. alexander: i would put together a group that addresses that encryption issue and comes up with a middleground solution ,hat companies, the government and the imagined people can live with. emily: twitter has been shutting down isis accounts. what is your thoughts on having teams working together in a more official way? gen. alexander: that is really important. what that represents on the

twitter side is accounts that are open for isis for recruiting and things like that. ones that clearly are going after creating jihad. a have to come up with solution for that. what twitter is doing is right. you would not put child there.aphy on there are all sorts of things we would not allow on the network. how do we address it with terrorism. emily: you may go down in history as the guy who was the head of the nsa during the revelations of edward snowden. how do you feel about that? gen. alexander: it gives snowden too much credit. he'd divulged was something that was approved by court order, approved by congress and the executive branch. and what the investigations found was the nsa was doing

exactly what it was supposed to. he revealed a classified program meant to protect our country. nsa does not get to choose who classifies it. that is the executive branch. that is a congressional and court decision. nsa's responsibility is to conduct that. and there is legal precedents for doing that. it was the right thing, when you look at the number of terrorist attacks. i think what he did was he thought he was better than all three. that.ess treated him like they treated him as a hero. here is a guy who will ultimately cause a lot of lives to be lost. that debate was going on in is a debatethat outside of nsa. emily: you think the pair's attacks could have been stopped at edward snowden -- gen. alexander: we would have had more information. i think terrorists are learning how to bypass intelligence and law enforcement.

we said the most likely place to be hit was paris. for all of these reasons. and it was. to see you are going increased attacks in europe and potentially the united states because of the leaks. the encryption will hurt it going forward. i think one of the things we need to look at is what was he doing, why did he do it. i think what the press has not if he revealed that one page, why did he take over one million documents? emily: so he had a lot more. gen. alexander: it has been revealed he took more than one million documents. what about the other documents he took? emily: who do you think is behind him? gen. alexander: clearly today, you have to look at russia and the influence by russia. when you look at all the aselations being reported, good as you are, you would

quickly come to the conclusion that all of the stuff revealed showed nsa spying on everybody but one country -- russia. emily: you think the russian government is behind edward snowden? gen. alexander: i would not go that far. clearly, he is doing something would have russia helped him. he would deny and russia would deny it, but -- emily: for millennials, snowden has become the idea of conscience. he is in exile. he is welcome to come back and face justice. emily: are you outraged by that? gen. alexander: here is the issue. the way it is reported -- and this is how you and others can help -- we sensationalize snowden but did not explain what the government was doing in a way people would understand. the perception was that the

government is listening to your phone calls and reading your e-mails. that you now know that is not true. emily: what is the full story? gen. alexander: exactly what has occurred with the data program, the metadata program. program, all of the information goes into a vault, and the government can only look into it when it can prove it is involved with a terrorist group. emily: has that data actually stopped attacks? gen. alexander: it has. i am not just for trampling over andody's to make haitians stuff. i am for a reasonable approach. it is interesting that -- jeff stone did not like this program either. he is on one side and i would be on the other, theoretically. what he came to was let's move is atta so the -- so it the service providers. and when the government goes to look at it, we can audit, as we

did, every time the government looks at it. those audits were available for the courts, congress, and the administration to look at. they found out that the only times that nsa looked at it was when it was associated with terrorists, period. nsa did was reported to the courts, congress, and administration, just as we were responsible for doing. my question is how did you get from a metadata program to we are listening to phone calls and reading e-mails? emily: how much did 9/11 surprise you? ♪

emily: you were born in syracuse, new york. the third of five children. you were a newspaper delivery boy. you ran track. what kind of kid where you? gen. alexander: probably more on the trouble side -- i did good academically, but i was always of testing the limits authority. i had a great time in high school and college. emily: yet he ended up at west point. gen. alexander: i did not know anything about the military. my dad was in the marine corps at the end of world war ii. i got a full scholarship to syracuse and perdue. my mother encouraged me to apply to west point.

i got accepted. i found that west point pays you. that is a good deal. how hard could that be? someone says they harass you there. how bad could it eat? i got there and the first three days, i called my dad and said these people are crazy,, and get me. what i found is what a great set of americans they were. i had a good academic background in high school. but i learned in the ethics at west point about duty, honor, country. -- myk might classmates classmates and all that, we joke about some things. but when you look at where those people come from and what they have done for our nation, it is incredible. emily: there were three other future generals with you -- if david petraeus.

did you know they would be so powerful? gen. alexander: i knew marty well. i knew skip. they knew me. was only going to stay five years. i think everybody thought dave would be. but for me, i am as surprised as they are. emily: u.n. on from west point to rise quickly through the ranks. gen. alexander: did not feel so quk at the time. emily: ifou intended to stay five years, what happened? gen. alexander: as my five years were coming up -- i had a great entor. at the time, a brigadier general. when on to be a lieutenant general. thathad been at west point talked about how do we take the future of our army? if we do not keep good people in the army, how do we change our army from what it was in the mid-1970's to where we needed it to be for the first desert

storm. he convinced me these are good people. you go out and make money, or you can help these guys. so we talked about that with my wife and my family. stay.cided to i got a job offer at 20 years. it was incredible. i would have made three times what i made in the military. i told my daughters and my wife, and my kids said you need to stay in the army. for gave up better cars themselves and all that, because they thought it was the right thing to do for the country. i was really proud of that. i thought it was the right thing. emily: you are ahead of army intelligence and security command in 2001. then 9/11 happened. how much did 9/11 surprise you? gen. alexander: let me back up a little. going into 9/11, when i was at central command, i was there for the east africa embassy

bombings. i had been there one week. so we knew terrorism was growing. i was therefore the uss cole. we were concerned about terrorists and raised that to a number of people. we were concerned our nation was at risk. when people came out of 9/11, the answer were there were apps. that is what these programs were developed to a dress. how do you get information to law enforcement to stop an attack. emily: it was in response to 9/11 you started monitoring phone calls? gen. alexander: it was an nsa program. emily: it was in response to 9/11 that the nsa -- gen. alexander: right. i was not in nsa. you join the nsa when these programs were already in place. did you have any second thoughts about them? gen. alexander: the one thing i thought as we were going through

it is that they were under the fisa court. i thought that is the right thing, so we pushed hard to get that done. emily: you do not think this could trample on civil liberties at all? gen. alexander: i could see both sides of it. the issue is if i make a public we are doing a, we are concerned about another 9/11, we see all these actions going on. and the courts looked at this and said here's how you ensure both. so it is not only do you collect to ensuremation but civil liberties and privacy under the fourth amendment. here is how you now access that data. here is how he recorded. here is how you will be overseen. there were tremendous measures put on nsa to ensure that. that part is not well articulated to the public. if they saw that, they would say that is amazing. so you mean to look at that

data, you have to show the court what you are looking at, , then havech step courts, congress, and the administration look at it each time you did that -- yes. it was not just nsa going in there and running around. this was a very deliberate program for a specific need. emily: the prism program was also in place. a program to secretly collect information from u.s. technology companies. gen. alexander: under fisa. prism allowed us to see the new york city subway. that was the first part. emily: was it a backdoor? gen. alexander: no, it was a court order. is a wiretap a backdoor -- no. prism was the modern-day wiretap. emily: you maintain the tech companies did know about this, even though they claimed they did not? gen. alexander: they were served the court orders. that is what the verizon orders and all the others that are public now show.

they were, by law, required to do that. mark: so when tim cook or zuckerberg or larry page says we had no idea this was happening, we are outraged -- gen. alexander: the issue comes not at that. it is a little more nuanced. the issue is what does nsa collect to conduct this foreign intelligence mission and the perception is nsa is into their servers and stuff. that is not true. emily: what is true? gen. alexander: nsa is not in any of the servers, to my knowledge. apple was not under my watch. nsa is authorized to collect can those companies under the fisa amendment act. it has to serve a court order to do that. and only in certain conditions can it do it. emily: what keeps you up at night? what worries you most? ♪

emily: your first day in the private sector, what was that like? gen. alexander: was april fools'. knowing me and what are my friends, i was betting somebody would call me and say my retirement was pushed back. go to a a plane to conference in las vegas. i was not sure what i would do. i had several job offers. i did not know if i wanted to work for somebody. i was not looking forward to working with somebody. i talked to some financial institutions at other companies. they said with what you know about cyber security, why not start a cyber security company? the more we got onto it -- i talked to some of the guys and said would you be interested in doing this? in six weeks, we said we could start a company. cyber security is

your firm. you said you are developing breakthrough technology. what is that? gen. alexander: breakthrough. [laughter] emily: what can you tell us about the technology? gen. alexander: like donald trump -- breakthrough. it is something everyone will love. emily: winning? gen. alexander: winning. actually, when you look at cyber security for a bank, a health-care company, what are the problems you see and how do we address those? we are trying to address head-on the problems that could not stop the sony or other attacks. we are trying to stop that. that is through behavior see the, the ability to entire network flows and be able to respond and give people much faster capabilities in terms of doing analysis to find the fault.

emily: what do you think of the clinton server issues, given your experience with cyber security and service? gen. alexander: at the end of the day, what the courts and the fbi need to look at is did she do anything wrong, was it her fault, or did somebody else do it? this is where comey is good. he will call it straight. a political. that is what our nation needs. what he finds he will put on the table. told the new yorker "i am really concerned something bad is going to happen." that people need to know we are at greater risk. do you still believe this? gen. alexander: in cyber and in terrorism. i believe it in both. emily: what is coming? gen. alexander: in cyber, when you look from 2007 to 2014 10 now, you see an increased set of

exploits and attacks against countries. financial going from institutions to energy institutions. in asian countries, you see inething called "duststorm," europe and the u.s., you see something called "havocs." gotukrainian power grid taken down in december and january. that is an indication of things to come. it really makes a important that we up done our cyber security capability. emily: what worries you most? gen. alexander: i am worried about our nation, cyber security, and terrorism. we have lost a lot of capability there. i do not think, as good as we were in the decade following next i do not think this decade we will be anywhere close because we have lost that much capability. emily: could 9/11 happen again?

gen. alexander: we could see significant terrorist attacks. i would predict it is more likely in europe than the u.s., because it is easier for terrorists to get there. i think travel programs have helped a great deal. i do not think that is sufficient. we will see jihadists and lone wolf-type things and it will bring us back to the discussion on security and privacy and . right now, we have the opportunity to do this in a nonemotional manner. we should take that opportunity and solve these problems to the best of our ability. it will not be perfect. but get reasonable people to the table. for the google, apple, facebook, and the government -- show them what is going on. then say how do we do this? do both, and i

think our country and government should help those, up with an international solution that does not disadvantage our industry. emily: you have four kates, 16 grandkids. what do you want your legacy to be? gen. alexander: i want to make sure -- take warren buffett's discussion. we want them to have a great life. we want them to be secure. be able to leverage all of this technology. solve things like cancer. and to have a full and happy life. that means involving what we are seeing and all of these other discussions. solicit thewould support our you and other media outlets is help tell the whole story. help us tell the whole story. there are things you cannot tell, just like you would be told. but there is a lot more out there that is not in talked about that gives the rest of the story. so i think we should have these debates.

but i think they have to put all of the information on the table. it starts with the snowden thing to today. emily: general keith alexander, thank you for joining us here today on "studio 1.0." ♪ you shouldn't have to go far

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x1 makes it easy to find what you love. call or go online and switch to x1. only with xfinity. rishaad: controlling the credit suisse, tidjane thiam said they need to be selective about what they did. taking up management, cut thousands of jobs, and cut even more. he called for a cultural change in the bank and private with past practices, completely unacceptable. the bank facing one of the most challenging periods in 160 years. we talk with tidjane thiam. ♪