Donald MacLean Kerr, Jr. (born April 8, 1939) served as the Principal Deputy
Director of National Intelligence from 2007 to 2009. He was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on Thursday, October 4, 2007. In March 2009, he received the National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal.
From 2005 to 2007, he was the director of the
National Reconnaissance Office
The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) is a member of the United States Intelligence Community and an agency of the United States Department of Defense which designs, builds, launches, and operates the reconnaissance satellites of the U.S. fe ...
and served as the Assistant to the Secretary of the Air Force for Intelligence Space Technology. He was sworn into that position in July 2005 by
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and
Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte
John Dimitri Negroponte (; born July 21, 1939) is an American diplomat. He is currently a James R. Schlesinger Distinguished Professor at the Miller Center for Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. He is a former J.B. and Maurice C. Sh ...
. Prior to his position at the NRO, he was Deputy Director of Science and Technology at the
Central Intelligence Agency
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gathering, processing, ...
from 2001 to 2005.
Prior to that, he was an assistant director of the
FBI
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the domestic intelligence and security service of the United States and its principal federal law enforcement agency. Operating under the jurisdiction of the United States Department of Justice, t ...
in charge of the Laboratory Division from 1997 to 2001. His earlier government service was with the
Department of Energy A Ministry of Energy or Department of Energy is a government department in some countries that typically oversees the production of fuel and electricity; in the United States, however, it manages nuclear weapons development and conducts energy-re ...
(DOE), first in Las Vegas as deputy manager of Nevada Operations and subsequently in Washington, D.C., as the Deputy Assistant Secretary and Acting Assistant Secretary for Defense Programs and later for Energy Technology.
From 1979 to 1985, Kerr served as the fourth director of the
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Los Alamos National Laboratory (often shortened as Los Alamos and LANL) is one of the sixteen research and development laboratories of the United States Department of Energy (DOE), located a short distance northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico, ...
(LANL). Prior to becoming director, he conducted and led LANL research in high altitude weapons effects, nuclear test detection and analysis, weapons diagnostics, ionospheric physics, and alternative energy programs. Kerr was nominated to be Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence by President
George W. Bush
George Walker Bush (born July 6, 1946) is an American politician who served as the 43rd president of the United States from 2001 to 2009. A member of the Republican Party, Bush family, and son of the 41st president George H. W. Bush, he ...
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.
Kerr held several executive positions in the private sector, including executive vice president and director at Information Systems Laboratories, Inc., corporate executive vice president, and director at Science Applications International Corporation, and president and director of EG&G, Inc. He currently serves on the board of directors for
Caliburn International, a military contractor that also oversees operations for
Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children
Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children is a 3,200-bed migrant children's detention center in Homestead, Florida. Until August 3, 2019, the center had been operated by Comprehensive Health Services, Inc. (CHSi), which is a subsidiar ...
.
Kerr was educated at
Cornell University
Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to tea ...
, 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."
A fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Kerr has published frequently on nuclear weapons efforts, national security and arms control, energy technology, and ionospheric research. He has received several awards for his public service, including the CIA Distinguished Intelligence Medal and the DOE Outstanding Service Award. He serves as Chairman of
The MITRE Corporation Board of Trustees, and he serves on the board of directors of U.S. Space LLC, and the advisory board of
MIT Lincoln Laboratory
The MIT Lincoln Laboratory, located in Lexington, Massachusetts, is a United States Department of Defense federally funded research and development center chartered to apply advanced technology to problems of national security. Research and dev ...
.."
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,
" really need to realize what 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. Not with me in my current job. 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 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
icpeople's private communications and financial information."
Notes
External links
Donald Kerr MITRE Board of Trustees*
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Kerr's speech denouncing anonymity
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kerr, Donald
1939 births
Living people
Cornell University College of Engineering alumni
Los Alamos National Laboratory personnel
People of the Central Intelligence Agency
Directors of the National Reconnaissance Office
United States Deputy Directors of National Intelligence
George W. Bush administration personnel