Head of NSA blasts reporters for ‘selling’ leaked documents

Reporters should be prevented from “selling” National Security Agency documents, Gen. Keith Alexander says in a videotaped interview with Department of Defense blog Armed With Science. In a discussion designed to reassure the American public that its government is not spying on them, the NSA chief calls for an end to the publication of documents leaked by former contractor Edward Snowden. “I think it’s wrong that that newspaper reporters have all these documents, the 50,000-whatever they have and are selling them and giving them out as if these — you know it just doesn’t make sense,” Alexander said. “We ought to come up with a way of stopping it. I don’t know how to do that. That’s more of the courts and the policymakers but, from my perspective, it’s wrong to allow this to go on.”

Previously in the interview, Alexander compares the public’s negative reaction to the necessity of intelligence collection to a child’s refusal to take a bath. “It’s like when you were younger — well, this is for boys,” he said. “You know, when you’re younger, you say, ‘I don’t want to take a bath.’ You say, ‘No, I’d never take a bath. Why would we want to take a bath?’ Well, you’ve got to take a bath, cleanliness, (et cetera). I said, ‘But isn’t there a better way?’ Well we don’t, so we had to take baths, right, or showers. What about here, what’s a better way to stop terrorists?”

Take a bath, America. And check out the full 32-minute interview with Alexander below.