The Watchers (62 page)

203
In late 1997 a three-star general met with Nacchio at his Denver office and later told one of Nacchio's associates that he wanted to use the company's network “for government purposes”:
See Nacchio's trial documents.

204
Hayden's proposal struck Nacchio, Payne, and Qwest's lawyers as potentially illegal:
Ibid.

204
In the weeks after the attacks the NSA asked telecom executives for access to their customer records as well as direct, physical access to their data:
This is based on my reporting of the request. See “More than Meets the Ear,” in
National Journal
on March 18, 2006, and “Tinker, Tailor, Miner, Spy” in
Slate
. See also “NSA Has Massive Database of Americans' Phone Calls,” by Leslie Cauley, published in
USA Today
on May 11, 2006.

204
If analysts started with a list of phone numbers, they could find all the other numbers called from those phones, and so establish the close circle of people in the targets' daily lives:
Recall that this is what the Parentage tool that Erik Kleinsmith used during Able Danger was designed to do. The NSA was using that tool before 9/11 to trace the locations of cyberhacks—the same kind of intelligence it wanted Qwest to help provide before the terrorist attacks.

205
Agency officials rebutted by questioning the company's patriotism. They let it be known that Qwest's competitors were already on board:
See my previous reporting in
Slate
and
National Journal,
as well as
USA Today
's article.

205
Lawyers for telecom and Internet companies were working overtime to comply with the government requests:
A number of said lawyers agreed to describe their work complying with these requests on the condition that they not be identified by name. They also didn't disclose the names of their clients.

206
The Treasury team, dubbed Operation Green Quest, was specifically interested in a money-moving system called
hawala
:
Interview with Marcy Forman, head of Green Quest, in 2002. See my story “Disrupt and Dismantle,” published in
Government Executive
magazine in February 2002.

206
The FBI unit, called the Financial Review Group, set out to discover the financial linkages that tied the nineteen hijackers to one another and to their sources:
See “Disrupt and Dismantle.”

207
FBI agents also dove into credit and debit card histories housed at First Data in Colorado:
See Ron Suskind's
The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006). I also interviewed a former Justice Department official who worked in an FBI command center immediately after the 9/11 attacks, helping to track financial information.

207
A unit at the Customs Bureau in Northern Virginia also joined the fray:
See “Disrupt and Dismantle.”

208
But financial data was also poured into the BAG and overlapped with phone and e-mail communications in an effort to dig deeper into terrorists' social networks:
Interviews with private-sector source who had direct knowledge of the BAG and the NSA's surveillance activities.

208
It plugged into an array of data sources, including those at AT&T, one of the oldest and most important telecom providers:
The most well-known source for this information is a former AT&T employee named Mark Klein, who went public with a set of documents that he said showed a secret facility meant to siphon off customer data at an AT&T site in San Francisco.

Separately, a former senior administration official confirmed to me that the company was supplying the NSA with massive amounts of communication data. In the words of this official, the agency was making a “mirror” of AT&T's databases.

Also see Leslie Cauley's article in
USA Today
, “NSA Has Massive Database of Americans' Phone Calls,” May 11, 2006. Citing sources with direct knowledge of the arrangement, Cauley wrote that “the National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T” and other companies. At the time, AT&T responded to the
USA Today
story with a written statement: “We do not comment on matters of national security, except to say that we only assist law enforcement and government agencies charged with protecting national security in strict accordance with the law.”

Also see James Bamford's
The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America
(New York: Doubleday, 2008), in which he offers a technical description of how information from AT&T's networks was provided to the NSA.

208
What to do with it—how to make
sense
of it—that's what mattered most:
This is a general problem in all kinds of analysis of massive amounts of data, regardless of the agency. But the NSA's problems in particular were conveyed to me by sources with knowledge of its work and were also highlighted in the 2009 report by five inspectors general, who concluded that the NSA program was of limited use. See “Report on the President's Surveillance Program,” released on July 10, 2009.

210
Poindexter secured a meeting with Bill Black, Hayden's number two and a career NSA employee:
Poindexter provided me with calendar entries as well as e-mails from NSA employees confirming his meetings with Black and Michael Hayden.

211
There he learned that a large percentage of phone calls, no matter which carrier generated them, passed through AT&T circuits:
Interview with Poindexter in 2008.

211
Poindexter told Black that he wanted the NSA on his network:
Ibid. Documentation obtained independently of Poindexter and his staff confirms that the NSA joined the network and eventually added more nodes than any other agency. This information is contained in an unclassified description of the Total Information Awareness network.

211
Instead of just monitoring individual targets, the terrorist hunters began to look for patterns:
See “More than Meets the Ear,” my article in
National Journal
, March 18, 2006. This account is based on interviews with government and private-sector officials about the NSA's surveillance activities.

212
Rather than leading them to sleeper agents, the NSA's intelligence usually led them to the doorstep of an innocent American, or a Pizza Hut:
“Spy Agency Data After Sept. 11 Led F.B.I. to Dead Ends,” by Lowell Bergman, Eric Lichtblau, Scott Shane, and Don Van Natta, Jr.,
New York Times,
January 17, 2006.

212
“I don't need this,” the official said. “I just need you to tell me whose ass to put a Hellfire missile on”:
Interview with said CIA official, who asked not to be named. This individual had direct responsibility for the agency's counterterrorism program.

212
Poindexter knew that had long been the agency's problem:
Interview with Poindexter. Even though he wasn't read into the agency's terrorist surveillance program, it was no secret that the NSA had been grappling with this problem for some time.

212
Exactly seven weeks later, on March 25, Poindexter went back to the fort and sat down with Mike Hayden:
Calendar entries and e-mails provided by Poindexter.

214
Once the first node was installed on the TIA network, in early 2002, Poindexter set out an ambitious schedule to enlarge his laboratory and build a working TIA prototype:
The “Report to Congress Regarding the Terrorism Information Awareness Program,” among other unclassified program documents and descriptions from the Information Awareness Office, charts the progression of the technology experiments. Additionally, a brochure I obtained from a source outside of Poindexter's office lists a chronology and gives the wind-based code name of every experiment as well as a description of what it entailed. Poindexter and Popp were able to amplify this information with other details during interviews.

214
Paul Polski, an old Navy Academy classmate, called Poindexter for help on an ambitious project to screen millions of airline passengers against terrorist watch lists and intelligence databases:
Interview with Poindexter. I also interviewed Polski about his career in 2003.

216
The FBI hired ChoicePoint, a data-aggregation firm based outside Atlanta, to give agents access to billions of records on nearly every person inside the United States:
Under the Freedom of Information Act I obtained contract documents that detail the arrangement between the bureau and ChoicePoint. See my story in
National Journal,
“The Private Spy Among us,” published on November 5, 2005.

216
The TIA researchers nicknamed the database Ali Baba, after the Arabian folk character who opens a cave full of hidden treasure with the magic words “open sesame”:
Interviews with Poindexter and Popp.

216
Simulated intelligence was also used to create ever more complicated synthetic worlds for testing the red team's attack templates:
Ibid.

217
NSA analysts did remove the experimental data crunching, linking, and extracting tools from the TIA network and quietly put them into service as part of the agency's warrantless surveillance regime:
Interview with private-sector source who had direct knowledge of the NSA's terrorist surveillance program. Poindexter and Popp said they were unaware of what any agency did with the tools once they were removed from the network. They said they had no knowledge of those tools being used for the NSA's secret program.

219
The Highlands Forum was created in 1994:
For a vivid history of the Highlands Forum, complete with descriptions of the Carmel locale, see Brian Friel's article “Start Your Engines,” published in
Government Executive
magazine in May 15, 2006. Also see the transcript of an April 5, 2001, interview with O'Neill on the Highlands Forum process held at the Center for Information Policy Research at Harvard University,
http://pirp.harvard.edu/pubs_pdf/o%27neill/o%27neill-i01-3.pdf
.

220
But O'Neill had paired him up with an outsider, a thirty-eight-year-old computer software designer from Las Vegas named Jeff Jonas:
Unless otherwise noted all statements, thoughts, and actions attributed to Jonas, as well as the details of his career, come from an interview I conducted with him in 2008.

220
When it came time for Jonas to speak, Poindexter thought he might be a comedian:
Interview with Poindexter.

225
Poindexter knew technology better than he did gambling, and in NORA, he saw potential:
Ibid.

225
Jonas stepped into Poindexter's office at DARPA headquarters:
I interviewed Jonas, Poindexter, and Popp about this meeting.

227
DARPA was considering whether to convene a study group to look at the balancing act of privacy and security, from a technical perspective:
I interviewed three participants about this meeting—Poindexter, Fran Townsend, and Marc Rotenberg, the president and executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. The final paper, titled “Security with Privacy,” was published on December 13, 2002, at
http://epic.org/privacy/profiling/tia/isat_study.pdf
.

230
They all asked the same question: “Did you see the following?”:
Interview with Popp in 2008.

230
John Markoff had first reported about TIA less than a week earlier:
“Pentagon Plans a Computer System That Would Peek at Personal Data of Americans,”
New York Times
, November 2, 2002.

230
The
Washington Post
followed with a story:
“U.S. Hopes to Check Computers Globally,” November 12, 2002.

231
Popp's first reaction was not to worry:
Interview with Popp. He also described the reaction within Poindexter's office.

231
Privacy activists could scarcely believe their luck. Was Poindexter really so politically tone-deaf ?:
Interview with Barry Steinhardt of the American Civil Liberties Union in 2008.

231
The
Washington Post
editorial board observed:
“Total Information Awareness,” November 16, 2002.

232
As Poindexter sat before fifty or so curious, skeptical, and undoubtedly confused members of Congress and their staffs, he hoped his guiding principles would keep him afloat:
Accounts of the briefing came from Poindexter and Popp. The staffer who confronted Poindexter confirmed the account.

233
The secretary of defense ordered Poindexter gagged:
At the time Poindexter denied all requests for interviews, including mine. He later told me that he was ordered by Rumsfeld's office not to speak publicly.

233
“If we need a big brother, John Poindexter is the last guy on the list that I would choose”:
Senator Charles Schumer on ABC's
This Week with George Stephanopoulos,
November 24, 2002.

234
a columnist for the independent
San Francisco Weekly
turned the tables on the supersnoop:
“Calling All Yahoos: Worried About What John Poindexter's up to as Federal Information Czar? Call His Home Number and Ask,” by Matt Smith, November 27, 2002.

234
“I don't know much about it,” Rumsfeld said:
See Defense Department transcript, “Secretary Rumsfeld Media Availability En Route to Chile,” November 18, 2002, at
www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=3296
.

236
That was the message that John Hamre brought back to his friend Poindexter after a scouting mission on the Hill:
Interview with Poindexter in 2008. Popp also confirmed that Hamre went to the Hill to gather information. Hamre's think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, was also under contract to Poindexter's office, examining models of oversight or legal protections that might permit agencies to conduct pattern-based searches of data. This was the policy side of the privacy equation that Poindexter was trying to balance. He'd first approached the National Academies of Sciences with the job, but when officials there thought the research was too politically sensitive to take on, Poindexter asked Hamre's group to do it.