At Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit in San Francisco, retired General Keith Alexander, former director of the N.S.A., challenged the audience to “call up Putin and ask him a question like [N.S.A. whistleblower Edward Snowden] did.” There would be, Alexander said, “zero chance he would answer the phone.”

Alexander was referring to an April televised interview with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Snowden was allowed to ask Putin a question about Russia’s monitoring of civilians, an inquiry Putin batted away with ease. Representatives for Snowden said he acknowledged that the appearance was a mistake.

Snowden, Alexander alleged, could have “gone to Congress” to complain about what he felt were privacy violations by the NSA, but instead “took millions of documents then went to China and Russia.” Snowden has alleged that he tried addressing his concerns inside the security apparatus.

“You can’t tell me that he isn’t working closely with the Russians,” said Alexander. “I think we’re being naïve if we think Snowden is a hero.” The real heroes, he said, were the government employees sifting through data to find potential security breaches within the agency’s systems.

Alexander’s points, which he’s shared before, were made during a panel entitled “Cyber-Security/Cyber-Insecurity: New Frontiers in War, Terrorism, and Crime.”

Moderator Andrew Ross Sorkin ofThe New York Times repeatedly expressed worry about the fact that his Chase bank account had been compromised in the recent JP Morgan hack attack, and asked the technologists on the panel, Kevin Mandia, C.O.O. of security firm FireEye, and John Hering, founder and executive chairman of Lookout, whether he would one day “wake up and see my bank account at zero.”

Mandia, quoting singer Debbie Gibson, answered, “Anything is possible.” Part of the problem, Mandia claimed, was that our government seemed to be sending a message that a hacker could act with “impunity.”

Moving toward privacy, Sorkin asked whether the new level of encryption of personal data in Apple’s iOS 8 sofware would “put [America] at risk,” or do customers a “great service.”

“Today we want better privacy, but you lose another 3,000 people and almost a trillion dollars from a [terrorist] attack,” Alexander said, ominously. “It’s going to come back—if we come up with a way that we can’t track it, they will get through.”

Hering said that more companies would be “going dark,” that is, using encryption to “force” a discussion about privacy.

Transparency has increasingly become a sticking point for Silicon Valley, sometimes putting the technology industry at odds with the government. This morning, Twitter sued the U.S. Justice Department, arguing that it should be allowed to reveal to its customers what information requests had been made by the government.

“There’s a massive shift towards companies making it much more difficult for monitoring to take place,” said Hering.