Keith Alexander
The NSA director who wanted to "collect it all" and had to answer for it when Snowden showed they nearly had.
An Army general, Alexander led the NSA from 2005 to 2014, longer than anyone before him, and in 2010 became the first commander of US Cyber Command, putting intelligence gathering and military cyber operations under one person. Collection grew dramatically on his watch; the phrase "collect it all" is attributed to his approach.
When Edward Snowden's documents were published in 2013, it was Alexander who defended the programmes before Congress. After retiring he founded the security company IronNet in 2014, which went public in 2021 and filed for bankruptcy protection in 2023 — a reminder that intelligence prestige and a business model are not the same thing.