The Watchers (29 page)

Wade liked the idea, but he heard something even more intriguing in Poindexter's pitch, a concept that he hadn't heard in any of the tech briefings he'd sat through since 9/11: the words “protect privacy.” Wade thought that Poindexter's was the first ambitious information architecture that included privacy from the ground up. He described his privacy appliance concept, in which a physical device would sit between the user and the data, shielding the names and other identifying information of the millions of innocent people in the noise. The TIA system would employ “selective revelation,” Poindexter explained. The farther into the data a user wished to probe, the more outside authority he had to obtain. An intelligence analyst mining and moving information would only encounter individuals represented as numbers, or as some anonymous marker. Poindexter also proposed an “immutable audit trail,” a master record of every analyst who had used the TIA system, what data they'd touched, what they'd done with it. The system would be trained to spot suspicious patterns of use: say, an analyst poking around in domestic data sources that had no bearing on a terrorism investigation. Poindexter wanted to use TIA to watch the watchers.

The CIA team liked what they heard. “Alan, you follow this,” Krongard advised. As TIA evolved, Wade and Poindexter held several more meetings, and the agency eventually installed a node on the TIA network.

 

Poindexter was glad for the enthusiastic response. But he wanted someone to challenge him. To poke holes in his theory and his reasoning, particularly his novel concept of selective revelation. He wanted someone to tell him he was wrong.

Fran Townsend seemed like she would know for sure. The senior official in charge of intelligence at the Coast Guard, which now played a pivotal role in homeland security, she was already on Poindexter's list of potential TIA participants. But he was most intrigued by her previous jobs and her peculiar area of expertise. Townsend was an authority on surveillance law.

Townsend had spent much of her career at the Justice Department. She started out in 1988 at the U.S. attorney's office for the southern district of New York and then spent the late 1990s working for Attorney General Janet Reno in Washington. Townsend had worked most of the major terrorism cases of the decade, including the Africa embassy attacks and the USS
Cole
bombing. She was among the few career officials in Justice who were following Al Qaeda and increasingly worried that law enforcement alone was ill equipped to halt its advances.

Like Poindexter, Townsend was seared in the early fires of the terror wars. She had been in law school at the time of the Beirut bombing, and as a prosecutor she became convinced that Hezbollah was responsible for the attack and had never paid for its crimes. At the tail end of the Clinton administration, Townsend oversaw the preparation of warrant applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the secretive panel of judges that oversaw the wiretapping of suspected terrorists and spies. Townsend was in charge of making sure the government's requests complied with the letter and spirit of FISA. She knew the ins and outs of the law, as well as the temperament of the judges and the strict barriers that had been imposed between the law enforcement and intelligence arms of government. (Foreign and domestic. Those same bright lines that had kept the NSA outside America.) By the time Poindexter sought out her counsel, Townsend was one of the few people alive who legitimately could call herself a FISA expert.

When she got the phone call, Townsend was taken aback. She had known Poindexter only by reputation. The idea that a former national security adviser would want a meeting with the intelligence director of the Coast Guard struck her as flattering and unusual. She wasn't about to say no. Townsend invited him to Coast Guard headquarters to brief her personally, as well as the service's intelligence and legal experts.

Poindexter gave the standard TIA presentation. Townsend could tell that he'd already anticipated having to cross a variety of legal hurdles. There was a gap between what Poindexter envisioned and what was doable under current law. But his proposals, specifically selective revelation, appealed to her. If TIA could actually “anonymize” the data it examined, and only reveal names through a legal process, then Townsend thought it would be an extraordinarily valuable intelligence tool. She imagined that it could help FBI agents find the most valuable leads to investigate, filtering out the dead ends and the background noise. That made TIA a worthwhile experiment, she thought.

But she knew that Poindexter wanted advice, not plaudits. So she tallied up a list of his vulnerabilities. “You're going to need advocates on the Hill,” Townsend said. The right staffers on the key committees, and he'd need enough face time to fully explain what TIA was and wasn't. Nothing in his proposal struck her as legally problematic for the moment, since it was still just a research project. But Poindexter was thinking years into the future, to a day where perhaps the government would have access to now off-limits sources of information.

Townsend knew how seriously the Justice Department and intelligence community obeyed “the wall” that separated their two worlds, in which information was acquired under different legal standards and used for different ends. Poindexter's vision would merge those two worlds. He was taking on two cultures at once.

Townsend had seen others try that, and the public reaction was explosive. She shared a cautionary tale with Poindexter. During the Clinton administration the FBI had launched a new e-mail monitoring technology named Carnivore. It was a packet sniffer, a tool that could track a surveillance target's online messages. But a combination of factors, not least of which was its unfortunate name, overwhelmed any chance for widespread acceptance. The public harbored abiding suspicions of law enforcement in general. Now the FBI wanted to read people's e-mail? Technological privacy activists were also outraged. Throughout much of the 1990s the Justice Department and the National Security Agency were making big public power plays to control the emergence of new Internet technologies. They'd pushed through a law that required all telecommunications companies to build their network in such a way that they could be instantly and secretly tapped. To a lot of people Carnivore was one more instance of relentless government excess. It attracted all the wrong kinds of attention. And Townsend had a front-row seat to what she considered a public relations train wreck.

“Learn from their example,” she told Poindexter. Don't make the same mistakes. Think about how people react to names, to perception.

“That's why I'm here,” he said. “Help me figure out how to avoid that.”

Townsend said that to win over lawmakers, privacy advocates, and individual citizens Poindexter would have to persuade them not only of TIA's value but that he had truly thought through the privacy protections. He'd have to convince them that selective revelation and privacy appliance weren't just buzzwords, lip service to the critics. If he couldn't do that, Townsend warned, “the public would react badly.”

Though she didn't say it, ultimately, TIA's fate all depended on Poindexter. Before the public could accept the idea, they first had to accept the man.

Townsend was taken aback by Poindexter's willingness to listen. She had imagined that he'd do most of the talking. The gentle, almost excessively deferential “gentleman” that she saw before her defied her expectation of an imposing, strong-willed military man toughened by Washington warfare. It was all so disarming.

Poindexter likewise knew Townsend only by reputation. She was an assiduous lawyer and had worked on terrorism cases for years. But he knew nothing of her thinking. Now he could see she was spirited and whip smart. And while he couldn't say the same for himself, she could cuss like a boatswain's mate.

Townsend was one of the few senior officials in Washington to have worked counterterrorism for both the Clinton and Bush administrations. Poindexter had a way of gravitating to these careerists, people like Mary McCarthy and Richard Clarke. It was no accident. In his relationships, professional and personal, he made no partisan distinctions. As long as someone was loyally committed to the fight, he didn't much care how they cast their votes. It didn't hurt that Townsend was politically more aligned with the current president than the last one, but it didn't particularly matter to Poindexter either way. That meeting at Coast Guard headquarters was the first of many, and their relationship accrued new value when, several months later, Townsend took a pivotal job at the White House.

 

As Poindexter shuttled around Washington in the winter of 2002, he left every meeting with the feeling that his audiences understood his approach and were generally supportive of it. At least outwardly. What they said when he wasn't in the room, he didn't know. And indeed, many of those supportive officials had deep misgivings about the idea and the man in charge.

For the moment, Poindexter opted for a low public profile. No big speeches. No unveilings just yet. But with him making the rounds of so many chiefs of the spy community, word about his radical proposal to mine private information was going to get around on Capitol Hill. And when it did, Poindexter would find himself in combat, once again, with his oldest nemeses.

Perhaps no one understood that better than Mike McConnell. As a former director of the National Security Agency, and he knew firsthand the extraordinary problems Poindexter would encounter trying to expand the government's access to data on American citizens.

Poindexter wanted McConnell's advice. He was a fellow admiral, and Poindexter had followed his career admiringly over the years. During the Gulf War McConnell was the top intelligence officer to then chairman of the Joint Chiefs Colin Powell. Poindexter thought he'd performed superbly, and he'd came to value his opinion when McConnell, after leaving government, attended the Genoa demonstrations and became a major player in the world of intelligence contracting.

The two met in McConnell's office at Booz Allen Hamilton, a brand name inside the Beltway. McConnell had led the intelligence business there since leaving the NSA in 1996. McConnell was frank in his assessments of what Poindexter was up against. He was heading for a political buzz saw.

Both men could see it. McConnell was concerned that Poindexter would end up creating dossiers of innocent people, and he wasn't sure that Poindexter appreciated just how disastrously that would play out with Congress and the public. Lawmakers would give Poindexter his biggest grief, but McConnell was prepared to provide “top cover” by talking to senior members and committee staff about TIA, with an eye toward supporting it. McConnell knew how to reach all those key influencers that Townsend had said Poindexter should seek. He would emphasize that TIA wasn't an operational system (that dirty little word again). McConnell also told Poindexter that he mustn't portray TIA as a domestic intelligence program.

McConnell could broach the subject of surveillance laws and regulations with far more credibility and less drama than Poindexter. He had enjoyed an impeccable Navy career, and his name counted for a lot in Washington, particularly among senior members of the Bush administration. He could clear Poindexter's path. That sounded, to Poindexter, like an excellent idea.

But McConnell didn't want to stop there. He told Poindexter that he should award Booz the entire TIA contract, letting the company effectively take over the research, testing, and construction of the prototype, a soup-to-nuts arrangement.

McConnell and his team arguably possessed the technical expertise and the manpower to handle the entire “system of systems” effort. And he thought he knew how to weather the political controversy. But Poindexter was reluctant to give one company—one man—so much influence over TIA's development. Business was booming after 9/11. TIA would hardly be the only jewel in Booz's crown.

“I'd like for you to participate in some way,” Poindexter said, leaving the door open. He could sense McConnell's disappointment. “I hope that you'll propose under the BAA,” he added, referring to his broad agency announcement out on the street.

McConnell would have to settle for less than the full project. Yet his ultimate prize was a handsome one. under a contract Poindexter awarded later that year, worth more than $8 million, Booz was tapped to help bring a prototype TIA system to life. McConnell and company would get TIA out of the lab and into the hands of government users, a process that Poindexter dubbed “assured transition.” Poindexter would create the system, but McConnell would spread it around. His connections, and those of his company, would pay off after all.

McConnell's offer of top cover was not part of the final deal. When Tony Tether reviewed the provisions of the contract, he struck that portion. “We don't need this,” he told Poindexter.

Poindexter pushed back, arguing that DARPA needed McConnell's influence. The agency only had one full-time legislative affairs specialist and one PR person. Tether was not persuaded.

Poindexter had worried since coming to DARPA that Tether wasn't facing up to TIA's political realities. It wasn't that he didn't want to address the controversy, Poindexter thought. He just seemed not to imagine there was one. “They haven't come up over the hill at us yet!” Tether was fond of joking. But Poindexter knew that if TIA exploded onto the national scene in the wrong light, he'd be left to defend it on his own.

 

Bob Popp sat at his desk, thinking about a sandwich. It was nearly lunchtime, and he'd spent much of the day reviewing sketches for the Information Awareness Office's new logo. Every DARPA office had its own custom design that was supposed to convey, elegantly and concisely, its animating ideas. Poindexter had asked Popp to hire an artist, who came up with several conceptual, abstract drawings. Popp thought they would look more at home in a modern art museum than a Defense Department office. “Go look at the other logos,” he told the artist. “They have three letters, with a little leaf, or a lightning bolt.” Nothing exotic.