Editor’s Note. Please note that this article was published on the first day of the fourth month of the year. Treat accordingly.
Security Current has learned that retired General James Robert Clapper, Jr. is a founding member and apparently the current leader of the hacker group Anonymous. “Dad’s interest in telling truth to power goes back a very long way, “ his son Eric, currently living in Moscow, told this reporter, “and he always loved masks.”
From his vantage point as current Director of the National Security Agency (NSA) Clapper has a unique perspective on the ways of cybersecurity and a great deal of influence on the development of national cyber policy.
Sources who chose to remain anonymous but stressed they were not Anonymous told us “this is why those NIST documents are so hard to understand. Even though the general is not over the agency he makes sure that the standards are so confusing that security experts will spend more time trying to figure them out than actually securing anything. In private, he often says ‘fips-schmips’”
We recently asked some folks hanging out at a coffee shop near the RSA Conference in San Francisco about this amazing news and got some expected responses. “PRISM and other NSA surveillance programs make sense now. Clapper is a clever fox, developing Anonymous clandestine hacker programs under the guise of clandestine government programs in broad daylight,” said Betsy, the last remaining barista that can afford to live in San Francisco. Like most baristas in this country, Betsy only goes by her first name.
Clapper is most famous for his testimony before Congress in which he assured the nation that data on them was not being collected. He later clarified that he had misunderstood the word “data” and thought the Congressional panel was asking if he collected America’s stamps. Later, in September 2014, Clapper explained the mission of the NSA as follows:
We are expected to keep the nation safe and provide exquisite, high-fidelity, timely, accurate, anticipatory, and relevant intelligence; and do that in such a manner that there is no risk; and there is no embarrassment to anyone if what we’re doing is publicly revealed; and there is no threat to anyone’s revenue bottom line; and there isn’t even a scintilla of jeopardy to anyone’s civil liberties and privacy, whether U.S. persons or foreign persons. We call this new approach to intelligence: “immaculate collection.”
When we asked our anonymous source about this quote, he remarked “Sure, that’s the general; he’s able to get you completely off guard with his light tone but behind the scenes, his Anonymous minions are carrying out their subversive agenda. He’s really quite brilliant.”
Aside from James’s double identity, the Clapper family is also known for their part in the Socratic dialogue Dedomeno which deals with data ownership and in James’s great-grandfather’s invention of a binary electric switch that is activated by abrupt noises.