Keith Alexander in his role as NSA chief at a Senate hearing in October 2013
Photo: AP / dpa
With a simple 8K filing, a compulsory notification to the American Securities and Exchange Commission, Amazon has made a remarkable person known.
The board of directors has appointed the retired general Keith Alexander as director and appointed him to its audit committee, thus making him a member of the company's management.
Alexander had gained some notoriety as part of the Snowden revelations.
The whistleblower Edward Snowden published extensive secret documents in 2013 that showed how the National Security Agency (NSA), of which Alexander was director from 2005 to 2014, developed and used extensive secret surveillance programs, such as the data collection and analysis program "XKeyScore" ".
With his mixture of affability, audacity and obesity, Alexander became the face of the NSA in the affair - and always conveyed the feeling that he knew much more about the dark secrets of the network than he could ever reveal.
He never wanted to admit wrongdoing, however.
Nothing that the NSA has done is "illegal or unprofessional," he always assured.
The service only represents America's interests: "My mission is to defend our country."
Keith Alexander's tenure finally ended in 2014.
But instead of retiring, he founded the company IronNet Cybersecurity a little later.
It was there that he began to convert his reputation as an intimate expert on NSA secret operations into face value.
According to information from Bloomberg, IronNet demanded monthly rates of up to one million dollars from customers, especially in the financial sector, for advisory services to protect against hackers and cyber attacks.
In a 2013 interview on the Snowden revelations, Alexander underlined that he is ready to fight hard against the press.
He explained to "The Verge" at the time that he thought it was wrong "that newspaper reporters had all these documents" and added: "We should find a way to stop this. I don't know how to do it. That is more up to the point the courts and policymakers, but from my point of view it is wrong to go on like this. "
US media speculate that the appointment of the ex-secret service agent could be helpful for Amazon when it comes to attracting lucrative public contracts.
In early 2020, for example, the company lost a billion-dollar cloud computing contract from the US Department of Defense to Microsoft.
At the request of Techcrunch, Amazon made it clear: "There are strict rules for conflicts of interest in government contracts, which we will continue to follow."
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