The likely next director of the National Security Agency will testify on Tuesday for the first time about his new job, in perhaps the agency’s best chance for a post-Edward Snowden reboot.

Vice Admiral Michael Rogers will field major questions about the future of NSA surveillance and the protection of the internet before the Senate armed services committee, his first opportunity to outline his vision for the world’s most controversial intelligence service since being nominated to lead it in January.

But he’ll only do so by proxy. The Senate does not confirm the NSA director. Rogers is testifying because of his simultaneous nomination to lead Cyber Command, the military’s new entity for defending its networks online and attacks on adversary data. It is deeply entwined with the NSA.

Rogers’ colleagues and former commanders in the navy give him high marks for his long, deep experience in intelligence, cryptography and network warfare, most recently leading the recently reconstituted Tenth Fleet, the navy’s component within Cyber Command.



“The network must be treated as a weapons system as we continue the fight to maintain our advantage in cyberspace, and thus across the other four war fighting domains: sea, air, land and space,” Rogers said in a January 2013 interview, expressing an ascendant viewpoint in military circles.

But his views on the bulk surveillance of US phone data and communications content believed to be foreign, exposed by whistleblower Snowden, are largely a mystery. In preliminary questions to the committee, Rogers stressed a need to comb through metadata repositories quickly in the event of an emergency, a concern often expressed by defenders of the status quo.

“Being able to quickly review phone connections associated with terrorists to assess whether a network exists is critical,” Rogers wrote, in remarks first obtained by the Associated Press.

Critics of the mass data collection have expressed concern that Rogers represented more continuity for the NSA than change.

“Right now, we don’t know a lot about Mike Rogers, but the little we do know suggests he is not a reform candidate at all, but more of the same,” said Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

“It’s a shame President Obama didn’t use this opportunity to appoint an NSA chief that can better calibrate Americans’ growing privacy concerns against the NSA’s current goal to ‘collect it all.’”

Peter Singer, author of Cybersecurity and Cyberwar, said he only met Rogers “pre-Snowden” and didn’t know what Rogers thought of the value of NSA’s mass surveillance activities.

“But in general, personnel changes do make it easier sometimes to change internal programs, as they allow a shift without making people have to admit they were wrong,” Singer said.

The NSA’s inseparable relationship with Cyber Command, an outgrowth of the military’s relative inexperience with cyber issues, has come under scrutiny. A surveillance panel advising Obama last year recommended splitting the leadership of the two organizations – as well as giving the Senate responsibility to vet and confirm the NSA director directly.

“There is a pressing need to clarify the distinction between the combat and intelligence collection missions,” the advisory group wrote in its December report.



The Obama team rejected the recommendations, seemingly out of concern that Cyber Command’s mastery of network warfare remained insufficiently mature to divorce it from the highly sophisticated NSA. Singer lamented the decision.

“Double-hatting melds everything from bad management practice to poor policy outcomes,” Singer said.

“Indeed, an irony now: among the many reasons for why NSA director/Cybercom head were ‘double-hatted’ in the first place was so that the the CyberCom head could speak with a bigger ‘voice’ in discussions with Congress and in policy.

“The irony now is that we have the opposite outcome; Congress is mostly interested in the NSA hat, not the equally important role in taking over a core military command for the future. Same with media and public.”

Rogers, who has attracted little congressional opposition, is entering the NSA at one of the most precarious moments in the agency’s 60-year history.

Not only have the Snowden revelations created global criticism of the agency – and, the NSA asserts, exposed its capabilities for adversaries to exploit – but the future of some of its major collection efforts remains undefined.

By March 28, the Obama administration and the intelligence agencies are supposed to come to a consensus on how to divest NSA of its domestic phone records database, a proposal greeted skeptically by the telephone companies and with major obstacles in Congress – some from those who want the bulk surveillance ended outright and others who want it maintained.

Additionally, the man Rogers is slated to replace, General Keith Alexander, has lamented that the Snowden leaks controversy has effectively blocked his ability to get Congress to pass a bill expanding Cyber Command’s ability to communicate privately with US businesses about the signatures of cyber intrusions and attacks – something critics fear will expand NSA’s domestic reach.