Donald Kerr

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Donald MacLean Kerr, Jr. (b. 1939) is the current Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence. He was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on Thursday, October 4, 2007. He most recently was the Director of the National Reconnaissance Office. He was sworn into that position July 2005 by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte. Prior to his position at the NRO, he was Deputy Director of Science and Technology at the Central Intelligence Agency from 2001 to 2005. He was also Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Kerr was nominated to be Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence by President George W. Bush on Wednesday, July 11, 2007. According to Congressional Quarterly, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on Tuesday, September 18, 2007 by a vote of 12-3, reported out the nomination of Kerr to serve as Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence.

Dr. Kerr was educated at Cornell University, receiving his BSEE in 1963, MS in Microwave Electronics in 1964, and Ph.D in plasma physics in 1966 for "Electronic Properties of the Penning Discharge Plasma".

On October 23, 2007, Kerr gave a memorable speech at the annual "GEOINT" conference on Geospatial Intelligence (to an audience including many people from his prior NRO job). He said, "[W]e really need to realize what a loaded word security really is. When I’m at work, and throughout my day, security is safety, as a barrier against physical or emotional harm. When I go home at night, security is privacy, as an expectation of freedom from unnecessary burdens. In the intelligence community, we have an obligation to protect both safety and privacy, and over the course of GEOINT 2007, as we talk about the hows of new technologies and tradecraft, I’d like to take a step back right now and talk about the whys.

"Safety and privacy – it’s common thinking that, in order to have more safety, you get less privacy. I don’t agree with that. I work from the assumption that you need to have both. When we try to make it an either/or proposition, we’re bound to fail."

Later in the speech, he said, "Too often, privacy has been equated with anonymity; and it’s an idea that is deeply rooted in American culture. The Lone Ranger wore a mask but Tonto didn’t seem to need one even though he did the dirty work for free. You’d think he would probably need one even more. But in our interconnected and wireless world, anonymity – or the appearance of anonymity – is quickly becoming a thing of the past.

"Anonymity results from a lack of identifying features. Nowadays, when so much correlated data is collected and available – and I’m just talking about profiles on MySpace, Facebook, YouTube here – the set of identifiable features has grown beyond where most of us can comprehend. We need to move beyond the construct that equates anonymity with privacy and focus more on how we can protect essential privacy in this interconnected environment.

"Protecting anonymity isn’t a fight that can be won. Anyone that’s typed in their name on Google understands that. Instead, privacy, I would offer, is a system of laws, rules, and customs with an infrastructure of Inspectors General, oversight committees, and privacy boards on which our intelligence community commitment is based and measured. And it is that framework that we need to grow and nourish and adjust as our cultures change.

"I think people here, at least people close to my age, recognize that those two generations younger than we are have a very different idea of what is essential privacy, what they would wish to protect about their lives and affairs. And so, it’s not for us to inflict one size fits all. It’s a need to have it be adjustable to the needs of local societies as they evolve in our country. Eventually, we can only hope that people’s perceptions – in Hollywood and elsewhere – will catch up."

These remarks produced major news coverage that said he'd said that "privacy no longer can mean anonymity...Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguards [sic] people's private communications and financial information."^[1]