NSA’s No. 2, its top civilian, will retire shortly

Richard Ledgett, deputy director of the National Security Agency, has announced he will retire this spring, the agency confirmed to CyberScoop Friday.

Ledgett, 59, has been deputy director — the agency’s top civilian — since January 2014, when he succeeded Chris Inglis. Prior to that, according to his official biography, “He led the NSA Media Leaks Task Force … responsible for integrating and overseeing the totality of NSA’s efforts surrounding” the Ed Snowden megaleaks.

Ledgett joined the NSA in 1988 and and rose to be, during 2012-13, director of the agency’s Threat Operations Center, the famed NTOC. Before that, he served a a stint 2010-12 in various posts in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, including being the the first national intelligence manager for cyber.

He is a recipient of the National Intelligence Superior Service Medal and was for a time an instructor and and course developer at the National Cryptologic School.

“It has been anticipated that he would retire in 2017 and he decided the time is right this spring after nearly 40 years of service to the nation,” the agency said in an emailed statement.

Last year, Ledgett presented a gloomy picture of the connected future, warning about the dangers of the Internet of Things. He told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s 5th Annual Cybersecurity Summit that “the connection to our networks of hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of internet-connected devices that come from multiple vendors and have differing software and hardware upgrade paths — without a coherent security plan — means that there are vulnerabilities [created] in those networks.”