The business partner, whose name we're not allowed to know, and with whom Alexander was able to collaborate immediately upon leaving his job, but not before, contributed the crucial insight-ostensibly without any assistance from his future business partner, who had access to all the most useful possible classified information-but despite coming up with this ostensibly invaluable intellectual property independently, the mystery man is willing to cut Alexander in for a seven- or eight-figure payday.Īlexander said they were particularly worried about threats like the Wiper virus, a malicious computer program that targeted the Iranian Oil Ministry in April 2012, erasing files and data.
Then, just as he retires, a mystery man comes through with a veritable flux capacitor. How fortuitous! It's these methods that Alexander said he will seek to patent."Īlexander toils in his spare time. Even if true that would be a scandal! Harris posed the obvious question: "Asked why he didn't share this new approach with the federal government when he was in charge of protecting its most important computer systems, Alexander said the key insight about using behavior models came from one of his business partners, whom he also declined to name, and that it takes an approach that the government hadn't considered.
He'd now have us belief that in his spare time he was developing even better techniques than the ones he developed in government. Indeed, he helped to invent new techniques for finding those hackers and filed seven patents on cybersecurity technologies while working for the NSA. secrets and disable critical infrastructure, such as the electrical power grid. From those two perches, Alexander had access to the government's most highly classified intelligence about hackers trying to steal U.S. Cyber Command, responsible for all cybersecurity personnel-defensive and offensive-in the military and the Defense Department. He was the longest-serving director in the history of the NSA and the first commander of the U.S.
We're supposed to believe that Alexander went home and developed much of a million-dollar-per-month cybersecurity technology in his spare time, while doing two different demanding national-security jobs, without using NSA resources or classified information, in a way that was somehow separate from his core duties, which included a cyber-security portfolio? This is an emperor-has-no-clothes moment.
However, if the employee invented the technology on his own time and separate from his core duties, he might have a stronger argument to retain the exclusive rights to the patent. If an NSA employee's job, for instance, is to research and develop new cybersecurity technologies or techniques, then the government would likely retain any patent, because the invention was directly related to the employee's job. Government employees are allowed to retain the patents for technology they invent while working in public service, but only under certain conditions, patent lawyers said. He said that he had spoken to lawyers at the NSA, and privately, to ensure that his new patents were "ironclad" and didn't rely on any work that he'd done for the agency-which still holds the intellectual property rights to other technology Alexander invented while he ran the agency.Īlexander is on firm legal ground so long as he can demonstrate that his invention is original and sufficiently distinct from any other patented technologies. Alexander is believed to be the first ex-director of the NSA to file patents on technology that's directly related to the job he had in government.