Poindexter defends his controversial ideas

14 August 2003
St. Petersburg Times
5A

John Poindexter resigned his Pentagon research job but maintained that his 
efforts to predict terrorist attacks by scanning public and private 
databases and developing a futures market on Mideast developments had been 
misrepresented and misunderstood.

"I regret that we have not been able to . . . reassure the public that we do 
not intend to spy on them,'' the retired admiral said in a letter. "I think 
I have done all that I can do under the circumstances.''

He advised his boss, Anthony Tether, that he would leave the Defense 
Advanced Research Projects Agency on Aug. 29.

He acknowledged that part of his Total Information Awareness program, 
renamed Terrorism Information Awareness after protests from privacy 
advocates, was controversial: the effort to develop software that could scan 
public and private databases of the everyday commercial transactions and 
personal records of Americans and others around the world to find clues that 
terrorists were preparing an attack.

Poindexter said that it would have been "up to the policymakers, Congress 
and the public at large - not DARPA - to decide whether to change law and 
policy to permit access to such data.''

He added that his office sponsored research in how to protect privacy during 
the data-scanning process.

He said his futures market project, known as FutureMap, was "distorted in 
press conferences and the media.'' But he added, "Admittedly, one of the 
contractors made this distortion possible by using some extremely bad 
examples that had not been approved.''

The project was designed to let traders, political experts and speculators 
wager by buying futures contracts from one another over the Internet on the 
likelihood of various economic or political events in the Middle East.