The next whistleblower of America may not have it as “easy” as Edward Snowden (relatively) may have, it seems.
United States National Security Agency (NSA) Director Keith Alexander announced on Tuesday that the agency is implementing a “two-person” system in order to prevent any future leaks as the ones made by Edward Snowden, Forbes reported. Alexander made the announcement at a congressional hearing of the Intelligence Committee.
In an answer to a question from a representative about how they were to prevent any similar incidents from taking place in the future, Alexander said, “Working with the director of national intelligence what we’re doing is working to come up with a two-person rule and oversight for those and ensure we have a way of blocking people from taking information out of our system.”
According to Forbes, the “two-person rule” would be similar to the one implemented in a few cases by the US military after US Army private Bradley Manning leaked thousands of letters to WikiLeaks. The rule required individuals to have a second person around while copying data from a secure network onto portable storage media in order to make sure the individual does not copy unauthorised data.
The questions rose in a conversation which looked into justification behind using surveillance that the leaks revealed. Forbes reported that Alexander claimed in the conversation that more than 50 attacks have so far been “foiled” with the contribution of NSA surveillance programmes which included collection of millions of Americans’ mobile phone records and the collection of foreigners’ personal data.
Of these 50 cases, ten involved domestic collection of phone records, Alexander claimed.