237
“The problem is that he may be the right man”:
Bob Levy, a Cato Institute senior fellow, spoke at a Cato forum on December 12, 2002.
237
“not only Timothy McVeigh,” who bombed the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, “but most farmers in Nebraska”:
Paul Rosenzweig of the Heritage Foundation testified at a hearing about TIA before the House Government Reform Committee Subcommittee on Technology, Information Policy, Intergovernmental Relations and the Census on May 20, 2003. His remarks were covered by Sarah Lesher in “Antiterrorism Measures Under Scrutiny,”
The Hill
, June 4, 2003.
237
The presentation lacked details, Steinhardt thought:
I interviewed Steinhardt about the meeting, his thoughts on TIA, and his appreciation of Poindexter in 2008. I also interviewed Popp about the meeting with Steinhardt and Dempsey.
239
In those fumbling moments Tether turned to Popp to fill in the gaps. He was mortified:
Interview with Popp.
239
To forestall a showdown on the Hill, Poindexter wrote a detailed review of TIA and the Information Awareness Office:
This is DARPA's “Report to Congress Regarding the Terrorism Information Awareness Program,” at
http://w2.eff.org/Privacy/TIA/TIA-report.pdf
.
240
Poindexter, who'd been telling Tether that he wanted to resign since the spring, now said he would leave by the end of August:
Interview with Poindexter.
241
rumors started circulating among the press corps that Rumsfeld had fired Poindexter:
These rumors were known to me through the course of my reporting on Poindexter and his resignation.
241
“I'm going to turn SAIC loose,” Poindexter told Tether:
Interview with Poindexter.
241
“You've got a $20 million contract on the line,” Popp said:
Interview with Popp.
241
He called his friend Bob Beyster:
Poindexter and Popp separately provided details about SAIC's intervention on their office's behalf.
242
This time they used descriptions of TIA and the Information Awareness Office that Poindexter and Popp had written themselves:
I obtained a copy of this presentation from a source who asked to remain anonymous.
242
At Poindexter's request, he came down to Fort Belvoir, to the TIA network hub:
Interviews with Poindexter and Popp.
243
NSA was a logical place for TIA to go:
I first reported the move of the TIA programs to the NSA in
National Journal
. See “TIA Lives On,” published on February 23, 2006. I note here that neither Poindexter nor Popp was a source of this information. Later, Popp publicly confirmed that the move had occurred in an interview with PBS's
Frontline
: “Spying on the Home Front,” May 15, 2007.
Before he died, I also interviewed Tom Armour, the program manager for Poindexter's Genoa II program, about the unit that eventually took over the work of the Information Awareness Office. He said that Advanced Research and Development Activity pursued technologies that would be useful for analyzing large amounts of phone and e-mail traffic. “That's, in fact, what the interest is,” he said. Armour told me that when TIA was still being publicly funded its program managers and researchers had “good coordination” with their counterparts at ARDA and discussed their projects on a regular basis. Armour declined to speak with me about the transition of the former Information Awareness Office programs to ARDA, and he was not a source for that information.
244
Popp drew up a simple list:
Interview with Popp.
245
Hayden sat down with the Democratic and Republican heads of the House and Senate Intelligence committees:
On May 16, 2006, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declassified a list of all the briefings the administration had given members of Congress about the terrorist surveillance program.
245
Harman thought that the PowerPoint presentation she saw was pretty thin stuff:
On September 20, 2006, Harman said during a House Intelligence Committee markup of a surveillance bill, “There has also been a stunning dearth of oversight over the President's NSA program in this committee. Months ago, I asked that Committee members meet with the NSA Inspector General, Members of the FISA Court, the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the CIA to learn whether the program has helped stop any terrorist attacks. The Majority denied each of those requests. I have asked for a copy of the President's Authorization for the Program and for other core documents. The Administration has refused to produce them. In June, I asked you, Mr. Chairman, to write a letter with me to the NSA Inspector General asking to review his seven reports on the program. You did not send that letter. A two-hour PowerPoint presentation from an NSA official, or an occasional briefing by the NSA Director, does not constitute sustained, serious oversight. None of these briefings has been on-the-record, on the purported theory that we could not find a single cleared stenographer, even though thousands of Executive Branch officials have been briefed into this program! The American people deserve better.”
246
Before he headed home for good, Poindexter stopped in at the Pentagon, to say good-bye to Rumsfeld:
Interview with Poindexter.
CHAPTER 21: BASKETBALL
251
Brian Sharkey sent an e-mail to firms working with his company:
I obtained a copy of this e-mail from a private-sector source that is independent of Sharkey's firm. This individual asked not to be identified.
251
One of Sharkey's colleagues sent a follow-up message to Hicks employees:
Ibid.
251
Appropriators spelled out in the classified annex which elements would continue to receive funding:
I verified the continuation of the specific programs with individuals who have direct knowledge of what's contained in the classified annex and who asked not to be identified. Additionally, I obtained an official document that describes which programs continued and how they progressed from a source who asked not to be identified. See also my story “TIA Lives On” in
National Journal
, February 23, 2006.
252
Now known as the Research Development and Experimental Collaboration, or more simply, “the RDEC”:
The aforementioned official document also describes the RDEC in detail. I interviewed former government officials and private-sector sources all knowledgeable of the RDEC and its work. These people asked not to be identified. I also spoke for background purposes with a Homeland Security Department intelligence official who confirmed the RDEC's existence and its purpose. See my story “Signals and Noise” in
National Journal,
published on June 19, 2006.
252
But he regretted that the privacy research had been tossed into the dustbin:
Interviews with Poindexter. He has emphasized on numerous occasions his disappointment that the privacy research was discontinued. I have found no evidence that he could have ensured that it was. The move of the programs from DARPA to the NSA's research unit was handled primarily in Congress, and by that time Poindexter was persona non grata there. Popp also had no real power to force the NSA group to take up the privacy research. He could only try to persuade them. Ultimately, it was the call of the officials working there, who were under the purview of Mike Hayden.
253
“When I walked away from that program,” he would recall years later, “I wanted nothing to do with it ever again”:
Mike Wertheimer told me this during our conversation at the “Analytic Transformation” intelligence conference in Chicago (cited also in chapter 13) on September 6, 2007, which was sponsored by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, where he was employed.
It's worth noting here that Wertheimer's judgment is not unique. Indeed, many surveillance experts, scholars, and lawyers told me that the Bush administration was justified in taking extraordinary steps in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attack to prevent another act of terrorism. In that exigent breach, these people said, violations of FISA could be forgiven. (Speaking on background, even an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union expressed this view to me and said he could have accepted a program of warrantless surveillance for six months to a year after the attacks.)
But, in these experts' opinions, in the absence of another attack or a clear and present threat to the United States, the administration should have rescinded the extraordinary authorities or sought changes to the law that would give the NSA the powers it needed to collect intelligence on terrorists. The fact that Wertheimer, a career NSA official, shared this view, and that he was in a position to know the severity of the terrorist threat in the months and years after 9/11, helped inform one of my core conclusions: The Bush administration squandered an opportunity to craft some middle ground, one that would have given the NSA the powers it legitimately needed in a manner that the public could accept.
253
One senior CIA official who was privy to the security agency's reporting routinely saw American citizens and other U.S. persons directly named in its reports:
Interview with said official, who asked not to be identified, in 2008.
253
Popp tried one last time to revive the privacy research:
Interview with Popp in 2008.
CHAPTER 22: RESURRECTION
254
Poindexter hadn't been far from Townsend's mind:
Interview with Fran Townsend.
254
Poindexter said that he'd like to get together:
Interviews with Townsend and John Poindexter.
255
Syracuse University had invited him:
I was also invited to speak on this panel, and it was on this occasion that I first met Poindexter. He sought me out and apologized for not agreeing to my previous interview requests. Not long after this meeting, I began the series of interviews that eventually culminated in this book. All the dialogue and descriptions contained in the passage about the Syracuse episode come from my first-person reporting. I also interviewed the student identified here, Sam Alcoff, and spoke more with Poindexter about his reactions to what Alcoff said.
259
The participants gathered at Cantigny:
The conference materials for “Counterterrorism Technology and Privacy,” held June 24 and 25, 2004, as well as the guest list, are available on the McCormick Foundation's Web site,
www.mccormickfoundation.org/publications/counterterrorism.pdf
. I spoke with one of the participants on background to better understand the format and how the participants interacted. I also interviewed Poindexter and Steinhardt about the conference.
259
both men had been informed about the NSA surveillance program:
See Barton Gellman's
Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency
(New York: Penguin Press, 2008).
260
Looking back, Steinhardt still felt that killing TIAâat least in one formâcounted as a win:
Interview with Steinhardt.
261
the attendees drew up a lengthy set of principles:
This report is also publicly available. It is titled “Counterterrorism Technology and Privacy” and was published by the McCormick Tribune Foundation as part of the Cantigny Conference Series. A copy is available at the McCormick Foundation's Web site,
www.rrmtf.org/publications/counterterrorism.pdf
.
261
It wasn't warrantless “wiretapping” that had senior lawyers at Justice on edge. Rather, it was the layer of surveillance that often preceded it:
A former senior administration official told me that it was the collection and mining of metadata, provided by telecommunications companies, that prompted Justice Department officials to object to the NSA surveillance.
The legal rationale for this objection, and the apparent acceptance of targeted warrantless surveillance, has never been fully explained. It is possible officials believed that because the government predicated targeted surveillance on some “reasonable belief ” that the participants involved in a phone call or e-mail had a nexus to terrorism, they then had the authority to collect intelligence. In the case of mining metadata, however, there could be no reasonable basis for suspicion, because, by design, the surveillance involves a massive, arguably indiscriminate, sweep of mostly innocuous communications. Put another way, it's a lot less “reasonable” to go fishing for bad guys without a known suspect than it is to try and find them through more discrete, targeted surveillance, particularly when there's some reason to believe that a party to the communication is connected with terrorists.
In any case, the former administration official confirmed that it was this massive surveillance that prompted the extraordinary showdown between Justice officials and the White House. This account is supported by reporting in
Newsweek,
specifically Daniel Klaidman's article “Now We Know What the Battle Was About,” published on December 13, 2008. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had also hinted in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on February 7, 2006, that the objections raised by Justice's lawyers involved some other activity than targeted warrantless surveillance, which at that point President Bush had acknowledged publicly as the “terrorist surveillance program.” Gonzales again appeared before the panel on July 24, 2007, to answer questions about the NSA's surveillance. In each of his appearances, Gonzales seemed to indicate that there was no opposition to that program within the administration. But when it became clear that there was, in fact, tremendous concern about it, some lawmakers accused Gonzales of lying. Not long after his testimony Justice Department officials spoke to reporters anonymously and said that the program in question that had caused such consternation involved data mining. They didn't go into specifics. See “Former U.S. Official: Gonzales âSplitting Hairs' in Testimony,” published on CNN's Web site on July 30, 2007. Also see “Gonzales Denies Improper Pressure on Ashcroft,” by David Johnston and Scott Shane,
New York Times
, July 24, 2007.