The Watchers (37 page)

Inouye had chaired the Senate committee investigating Iran-Contra. When the embattled national security adviser appeared before him, Inouye called Poindexter's testimony, in which he acknowledged withholding information from Congress and even the president, “incredible, mind-boggling, chilling.” Almost two decades later Inouye was effectively passing judgment on Poindexter again.

Word came back that the appropriators were prepared to make a deal. Sharkey and his team had been making progress with their efforts too. Those in a position to save TIA from the chopping block understood that some of Poindexter's ideas were worth keeping.

Popp was relieved. He had planned to remain at DARPA and take over as director when Poindexter resigned. From the signals he'd received via Perry and the SAIC lobbying teams, it was clear he would have to come up with some kind of peace offering. A way for the Information Awareness Office to remain intact but perhaps not with all of its most controversial research. But it must stay at DARPA
,
he thought. Nowhere else in government had the vision and the discipline to see TIA through properly. Take it away from the original team and the program could fall apart.

The Hill got the message. Except for the last part.

TIA had to change homes. Tether in his awkward briefings had failed to make the case that his agency was capable of handling the program. Popp's sources reported back that the lawmakers were in no mood to let DARPA hold this hot potato. The agency seemed to have strayed well beyond its normal boundaries. They were getting dangerously close to the red zones of policy, of intelligence operations.

Popp hadn't planned for this. In his mind he had worked out a way to keep the research alive, but he had to keep his hands on it to do that. It had come to an unthinkable decision, befitting Solomon's court. Would he let TIA go in order to let it live?

Perhaps it was best that he didn't have to decide. In the flurry of backroom conversations and brokering over TIA's fate, one candidate came forward to take over Poindexter's programs, to pick up the shattered pieces and rebuild them. Most agencies would have shied away from such a task. But the NSA was no such agency.

 

If Poindexter and Popp really thought about it, the NSA was a logical place for TIA to go. They were a signals agency, and their ears were filled with noise. Poindexter knew from his meetings with Mike Hayden, Bill Black, and others at Fort Meade that they were on similar quests.

But Poindexter had misgivings about Hayden. He'd been picking up signals from the Hill that senior NSA officials were bad-mouthing TIA. Whispering that Poindexter's idea was far-fetched, that it wouldn't work. Poindexter had always suspected Hayden was personally behind the rumors. Maybe it was jealousy. Maybe ignorance. He wasn't sure.

Still, the NSA was full of kindred spirits. People like Poindexter who put their faith in technology's power to solve the big problems, to protect the nation. They were true believers. The agency had a special R&D unit that could handle the work and that stood a good chance of eventually building a prototype that could actually be put to use.

It was called the Advanced Research and Development Activity, and in theory it was a lot like DARPA. Its charter was to field new technology for all the intelligence agencies, just as DARPA was supposed to work for the entire Defense Department. In fact, though, the group was an NSA-owned operation. The director of ARDA reported to the director of central intelligence
through
the director of the NSA. On paper the line of demarcation seemed inconsequential. In practice it meant everything. ARDA was the agency's property. It was even housed in a building at Fort Meade.

Popp focused on working out a deal with Congress over which programs to keep and which ones to kill. The decision would not be based on merits. He knew that Congress wasn't interested in debating the finer points of data mining versus pattern analysis or listening to lengthy explanations about synthetic data worlds. It was time to make sacrifices.

Popp drew up a simple list, dividing the office's many programs into two buckets: those that were so controversial as to arouse continued debate and press attention, and those that were less likely to attract unwanted attention. FutureMAP went in the former column, no question. So did the research on identifying people at a distance based on how they walked. useful? Yes. Creepy? Absolutely.

Popp went through all the programs, applying this brutal calculus. He boiled everything down to a sound bite and asked himself whether it passed that critical “
Washington Post
smell test.”

Then it was time for the privacy research. TIA's critics had largely glossed over this part of the program, and Poindexter's assurances about selective revelation and audit trails had rung hollow. For Popp it was an obvious choice what to do with this research. Though he might wish otherwise, it belonged in the kill bucket.

Privacy had become the third rail. It wasn't just controversial in its own right. The subject created
more
controversies. Popp thought that if he tried to save the research, people would ask why: What are you doing that requires such strong safeguards? We thought this was just research. You aren't poking around in off-limits information . . . are you?

Popp had no reason to know that the NSA already was. His team had unwittingly assisted them by inviting them into the experimental network. And while TIA prepared for its new home, members of Congress were making a connection: John Poindexter and Mike Hayden's work sounded terribly similar.

 

In July 2003, with the controversy over TIA about to hit the boiling point, Hayden sat down with the Democratic and Republican heads of the House and Senate Intelligence committees. They were his legislative overlords. George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, and Vice President Dick Cheney joined Hayden for the meeting at the White House.

Porter Goss, the Republican chair of the House Intelligence Committee and a former CIA officer, had attended five briefings on the NSA's secret surveillance program already. Only his Democratic colleague, Nancy Pelosi, had received as many. But that day they were joined by three relative newcomers. California congresswoman Jane Harman, a Democrat, had taken over the ranking House committee slot from Pelosi. And on the Senate side, Pat Roberts, a Republican from Kansas, and John Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, had been made aware of the NSA's new orders only recently. This was only the second briefing they'd ever received on the program from administration officials.

And brief was the operative word. Harman thought that the PowerPoint presentation she saw was pretty thin stuff and didn't constitute full disclosure. These presentations, led mostly by Hayden, had been limited almost entirely to the intelligence committee heads—four people at any given time. The administration had still never briefed the four party leaders from the House and Senate. Together, these members constituted the so-called Gang of Eight and were customarily let in on sensitive operations like this.

Hayden, Tenet, and Cheney gave the four intelligence overseers a glimpse into the NSA's world, but they forbade the lawmakers to speak publicly about it. They couldn't talk to their staff members or the committees' lawyers. Rockefeller was troubled by the presentation. The details weren't entirely clear to him. What exactly had he just heard?

Later that day, he penned a letter to Cheney. “I am writing to reiterate my concerns regarding the sensitive intelligence issues we discussed today,” Rockefeller wrote. “Clearly, the activities we discussed raise profound oversight issues.” The senator confessed that he was “neither a technician nor an attorney.” And since he couldn't discuss the program with his staff, he could not “fully evaluate, much less endorse these activities.”

But there was something else. “As I reflected on the meeting today, and the future we face, John Poindexter's TIA project came to mind, exacerbating my concern regarding the direction the administration is moving with regard to security, technology, and surveillance.”

What Rockefeller heard sounded familiar indeed. “Without more information and the ability to draw on any independent legal or technical expertise, I simply cannot satisfy lingering concerns raised by the briefing we received.”

Rockefeller signed the note, put a copy in a sealed envelope, and filed it in a classified facility in the Senate committee's offices.

 

Poindexter packed his bags in early August. The press seemed to say he'd been forced out. He was in no position to say otherwise. Even if FutureMAP hadn't blown up on him, Poindexter was well past his self-imposed one-year tenure. It was time to leave.

Before he headed home for good, Poindexter stopped in at the Pentagon, to say good-bye to Rumsfeld. He walked into the office, and the secretary came straight for him. Before Poindexter could say a word, Rumsfeld apologized. “John, I think we overreacted on the FutureMAP thing.”

“Don,” Poindexter said, “I agree. It's a good idea.”

That was the last time they spoke.

Popp took over at the office for the next couple of months. His sole job was to salvage Poindexter's work, managing the transition over to ARDA. It was a quiet, last-ditch effort, conducted entirely out of the public eye. The move itself was classified. As far as civil liberties activists were concerned, Poindexter's brainchild was imploding. He had left. Congress was going to pull the funding. TIA was on its deathbed.

Not quite. Buried deep within the massive Defense Department spending bill for the coming year, cobbled together by the powerful senators and staffers that Popp had been courting, TIA found an escape hatch.

That was the pledge. As far as the Defense Department's budget was concerned, not a nickel would go to TIA.

But then, a caveat.

It was the black budget. An underground river of undisclosed billions flowing directly into the spy agencies. It would carry the program formerly known as TIA. With a pair of obscure yet legally elegant sentences, Poindexter's vision was given a second chance.

The compromise for keeping TIA alive in some form was that it not be used for domestic counterterrorism or against U.S. persons. But that was a flimsy rule, and one easy to break, since the lines between foreign and domestic were getting blurrier all the time. And the prohibition technically only applied to the current fiscal year. If a TIA system was ever up and running, the rules could be changed. But lawmakers had struck a compromise, one that sustained a research program some considered vital, but blocked it from being unleashed on the American public, at least for now. Each side had gotten what it wanted.

Now, a black veil descended over Poindexter's program. Every dollar once spent on TIA in the open now was spent in the dark. Every experiment conducted outside the wall of secrecy now went to the other side. As far as the public knew, TIA was dead.

But as Poindexter drifted back into his private world and watched his enemies declare victory, he comforted himself with the secret. TIA lived.

Too often, privacy has been equated with anonymity; and it's an idea that is deeply rooted in American culture. . . . But in our interconnected and wireless world, anonymity—or the appearance of anonymity—is quickly becoming a thing of the past.

I once asked someone in the diplomatic corps, What do you think about intelligence as a professional? . . . The answer was, Well, let me tell you what a diplomat is. A diplomat is someone that can tell another person to go to hell and make them look forward to the trip. An intelligence officer is someone who can tell another person to go to hell and has the means to deliver them to that track.

 

 

 

 

Poindexter's crew waited for news of his next move. One Tuesday morning in early December 2003 word arrived: They were back in business.

Brian Sharkey sent an e-mail to firms working with his company, Hicks & Associates, to build the TIA prototype. He explained that an organization had come forward to sponsor their project. The precise scope of work going forward still needed to be sketched out, but Sharkey confidently reported that there would be a lot of it.

TIA had barely skipped a beat. Even the contract used to pay Hicks remained in place. Besides the new sponsor, only TIA's name would change.

“We will be describing this new effort as ‘Basketball,' ” Sharkey wrote.

Sometimes one could only guess what inspired the vague, innocuous code names attached to secret government programs. The fact that they
were
vague and innocuous counted for a lot. Basketball was no different, although the image of TIA simply bouncing from one agency to another was apt. One of Sharkey's colleagues sent a follow-up message to Hicks employees, instructing them not to use the name of Poindexter's old program: “TIA has been terminated, and should be referenced in that fashion.”