Admiral Michael Rogers doesn't lay complete responsibility at the doorstep of the NSA. New NSA chief: Agency has lost trust

The NSA has lost the trust of the American people as a result of the Edward Snowden leaks, and needs to be more transparent to gain it back, the NSA’s new director said Wednesday in his first public comments since taking control of the embattled spy agency.

“I tell the [NSA] workforce out there as the new guy, let’s be honest with each other, the nation has lost a measure of trust in us,” Admiral Michael Rogers told a conference of the Women in Aerospace conference in Crystal City, Va.


In the future, he said, “If we make a mistake, you will hear about it. That’s my job as director and I have no problem with it. … We are not going to hide our mistakes.”

( Also on POLITICO: Surveillance orders declined in 2013)

“The whole media leaks issue as we call it, has caused quite a stir,” said Rogers, who was sworn in as director of NSA and assumed command of U.S. Cyber Command at the beginning of April.

Rogers didn’t lay complete responsibility at the doorstep of the NSA: He blamed public mistrust on the way the newsmedia had framed the issues raised in the Snowden revelations.

“From my perspective the debate and the dialogue to date have been very uneven,” he said.

“Your neighbors are saying to you: ‘Man, I’ve been listening about you on the TV and reading about you in the papers and I had no idea what a bad person you are,’” he joked.

He said the NSA and its staff had to work to “earn and sustain” Americans’ trust, but could not be too open about the work of the ultra-secret agency, which specializes in electronic eavesdropping and other surveillance using the latest high technology.

“I believe in transparency and I will be as transparent as possible, but I also have to be mindful that in doing so I cannot undermine the specifics of what we’re doing” to protect the country, he said.

“To do that [be transparent] I have to get out of my comfort zone,” he acknowledged. “I have to walk that tightrope.”

During a Q&A, Rogers told the conference that one of the biggest challenges of going to war in cyberspace is that humans just can’t think or act quickly enough when attacks can take down a network at the speed of light.

“At the speed and the size and the complexity of this, if the fundamental premise of our defensive structure is we need a man in the loop, that makes agility, that makes responsiveness really hard,” he said.

“Help us automate” the work of cyber-offense and cyber-defense he told the audience of industry executives and military officials.

“One of the things we have to figure out is where does a man in the loop make sense and where do we need to automate,” he said.

He also asked industry to help the agency develop new technology for what military types call “situational awareness” — that’s “knowing what’s going on” to the rest of us.

“We have got to be able to visualize these networks that we’re defending in a way that makes possible effective as well as efficient decision making.”

He noted that, as a commander walking onto the bridge of a ship, “I’ve got a visual display that through symbology, color and other things, I’ve been trained to interpret to give me a sense … of how the domain looks around me to enable me to start making decisions.”

“I need us to do exactly the same thing with the cyber world,” he said.

Wrapping up his remarks, he urged the attendees at the event to “network and meet new people.”

Women in Aerospace is a nonprofit founded in 1985 dedicated to “expanding women’s opportunities for leadership and increasing their visibility in the aerospace community,” according to its website.

“Take advantage of the opportunity to gain insight from the men and women around you,” said Rogers, “Because you never know when you’re going to be in a position to harness that.”