Nice intranet you’ve got there. Shame if something should happen to it.

In the nearly nine years that made Gen. Keith Alexander the longest-ever-serving head of the National Security Agency, he spent a lot of time sounding the alarm about impending cyber attacks on America’s private financial infrastructure (AKA the folks that brought you the 2008 economic collapse).

“We’ve seen the attacks on Wall Street over the last six months grow significantly,” Alexander told Congress in March of 2013, a year before his retirement.

Now a private consultant, Alexander has made news this summer by seeking six- or seven-figure sums for hacker-proofing private computer networks. But this raised a number of eyebrows, and not just because of the price.

First, Alexander partnered with Promontory Financial Group, a regulatory compliance consultancy for the financial industry that almost every report out there can’t help but call “shadowy.” Promontory has made a science out of classic Washington revolving-door regulation — building a kind of 400-resident strong retirement home for ex-government employees, where the guys who wrote the rules then cash in by showing banks how to flout them.

Then, Alexander, who filed seven cybersecurity patents while he was at NSA, offered to help large corporations fend off malicious hackers with his new “behavioral models” for spotting pre-crime (patent pending — seriously — nine of them, says Alexander).

The former DIRNSA says that his new cyber-consulting in no way trades on the classified information he perused during his long tenure as a spymaster (that, of course, would be illegal), and that his new way to stop cybercrime did not come to him till just after he left his government job, thanks to input from an unnamed business associate.

That was all a little too pat for Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Fla., who wrote to some of Alexander’s potential clients in June [PDF], asking just what the former NSA chief was offering in exchange for his hefty fees.

“I question how Mr. Alexander can provide any of the services he is offering unless he discloses or misuses classified information, including extremely sensitive sources and methods,” Grayson wrote. “Without the classified information that he acquired in his former position, he literally would have nothing to offer to you.”

One of the recipients of this letter was SIFMA, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, a trade group representing banks, securities firms and asset managers. SIFMA responded to Grayson in July [PDF] — sort of.

“Thank you for your inquiry about our efforts concerning cyber security,” starts the letter from SIFMA to Grayson. “I am glad that you share our interest in this important issue. Cyber attacks are increasingly a major threat to our financial system. As such, enhancing cybersecurity is a top priority for the financial services industry. SIFMA believes we have an obligation to do everything possible to protect the integrity of our markets and the millions of Americans who use financial services every day.”

To be clear, as has been noted by Marcy Wheeler, this is not about, say, protecting consumers from thefts of credit card data, like that which befell Target customers last year (because Target had not actually implemented its own cybersecurity plan). Those Americans in the financial markets to whom SIFMA refers are actually high-volume, high-frequency traders — i.e. the banks and brokerages represented by SIFMA.

And to be clearer, SIFMA’s language in this letter reflects its lobbying efforts on behalf of a public-private mind meld of grand proportions: