The College Hill Independent

Total Information Awareness and other dreams forever lost
John Poindexter’s career as a technologically advanced political lightning rod
. . . by Paul Levande / illustration by Alison Brockhouse

On August 12, 2003, a prominent and high-ranking Bush Administration official defiantly resigned in a swirl of controversy and ridicule. Admiral John Poindexter was once again jettisoned from public life after the public debut of two programs developed by his Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—Total Information Awareness, and later, Terrorism Futures Market—provoked a hailstorm of criticism, even disbelief. Poindexter was referred to alternately as a near-pathological liar, a megalomaniac, and a creative, intelligent problem-solver fatally constrained by a myopic Washington intelligence establishment.

But outside the governmental and business circles he has made his career in, away from the liberals who denounced him since his appointment, Poindexter’s name is not widely known. This is partially because of his temperament. Unlike other controversial public figures, Poindexter is not media savvy, charismatic, or outwardly passionate; former independent counsel Lawrence Welsh, who prosecuted Poindexter during the Iran-Contra affair, called him the “personification of stolidity,” in contrast to antagonistic fellow conspirator Oliver North.

That scandal took place during Poindexter’s last government tenure, as President Reagan’s National Security Advisor, and made it difficult for him to reenter public life. Poindexter was one of the primary architects of the Iran-Contra plan in which Reagan officials, seeking the release of American hostages, sold arms to Iran and used residual profits from the deal to support the Contras, a Nicaraguan guerrilla group fighting the communist Sandanista government. In the subsequent investigation, Poindexter was convicted of lying to Congress and obstructing justice. These convictions were eventually overturned, but Poindexter was tainted and was forced to resign.

Controversy has never emboldened Poindexter, and he has never embraced the high profile speaking gigs, television commentary guest spots, or publishing opportunities taken by the likes of North, Henry Kissinger, and Watergate figure G. Gordon Liddy. Until his recent resignation, Poindexter served the current Bush Administration as the head of the Information Awareness Office (IAO) at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and did so rather quietly. His triumphant return to public life hardly registered in the media. Then again, DARPA occupies a relatively low profile position as a Pentagon research group. It was forged in the panicked aftermath of the launch of Soviet satellite Sputnik, and its past projects include the development of stealth aircraft, cruise missiles, integrated circuitry, and stabs at artificial intelligence. Despite its relative anonymity, it has had a profound impact on everyday life—thirty years ago, when DARPA was called ARPA its ARPAnet was the original model for the Internet.

The DARPA website proudly displays the organization’s principles. They include: “Management’s job is to serve the project managers,” “freewheeling, zealous program managers,” and “freedom from bureaucratic impediments.” In short, it is an engineer’s paradise, a place where divergent thinking is encouraged and bureaucracy is emasculated. Poindexter, who earned an M.A. and a Ph.D. in nuclear physics, is an engineer at heart. His IAO was formed in another, post-Cold War, episode of government panic, this one after September 11. In a speech at a DARPA conference, Poindexter explained his job as a mission to “find the terrorists in a world of noise, understand what they are planning, and develop options for preventing their attacks.” Total Information Awareness (TIA) and the Policy Analysis Market (PAM) grew out of this mission.
BETTING ON THE ADMIRAL

When the Iran-Contra scandal broke, Poindexter claimed he had acted without Reagan’s knowledge or consent. After the trial, he was initially convicted of five charges: two for lying about his knowledge of an Israeli missile shipment to Iran, one for obstructing the Congressionalinvestigation into Iran-Contra by frantically deleting his communications regarding the affair; one for lying to Congress about Oliver North’s role, and one for conspiracy. He faced two and a half years in prison. But in order to get Poindexter to answer his questions, Welsh, the independent counsel, agreed that part of Poindexter’s testimony would be given under immunity. After the conviction, an appeals court ruled that the prosecutors hadn’t proven absolutely that the testimony given under immunity did not help result in his conviction. His conviction was overturned, though Poindexter’s guilt was never questioned.
Sixteen years later the Bush administration announced Poindexter’s appointment to DARPA. Helen Thomas, a prominent former reporter and current syndicated columnist for Hearst News Service known for her hostility to the Bush Administration, asked why a convicted perjurer was chosen. Then-press secretary Ari Fleischer responded, “Poindexter is somebody who this administration thinks is an outstanding American.” Fleischer emphasized Poindexter’s successful and varied military career, which ranged from commanding a destroyer squadron to renovating the Navy’s training system with computer technology, but failed to mention his involvement in Iran-Contra.

Like many ex-government officials, Poindexter found a comfortable niche in business after being forced out of public office, consulting at or founding a number of technology firms and working on security issues. Syntek, the last company he worked for before re-entering government, did contract work for DARPA. ‘Genoa,’ one project he worked on at Syntek, was the precursor to his work at the IAO. The Admiral had experience in the military, both in the field and as an administrator, and he also had experience with the proper technology. No one could call him unqualified for his new job overseeing research and development of technologically oriented projects under the IAO. Poindexter might also have benefited from his exemplary loyalty to Reagan during Iran-Contra; unswerving loyalty is a characteristic of utmost importance for Bush. Poindexter was only one in a series of faithful neoconservative icons (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice, Assistant Secretary of State Otto Reich, Special Assistant to the President Elliot Abrams, Henry Kissinger) from Bush’s father’s generation called back for another tour of duty.

COLLECT THEM ALL!

Poindexter publicly announced his plans for the IAO as soon as he was appointed. His goal was to create a Total Information Awareness system that could search a unified database for information characteristic to terrorists. For such a database to be effective, it would have to contain a vast range of information, including financial, medical, and travel records. The IAO would also have had to develop appropriate “data mining” software capable of recognizing, learning from, and responding to patterns in vast arrays of seemingly random information. Less controversial examples of this type of technology include finding particular kinds of galaxies from astronomical data or determining the general profile of a customer loyal to a particular product from reams of market research. In contrast, the ominous, technologically dystopian implications of TIA caused an immediate paroxysm of outrage and dissent. Critics called it Orwellian, a massive, institutionalized invasion of privacy. It was also criticized on more utilitarian grounds—are terrorist ‘patterns’ so different from those of innocent people that a program could distinguish them?

Opponents to TIA even collected all of Poindexter’s own personal records and put them online, reasoning that if a unified database were compiled then such information would be easily accessible. Look online now and you can find satellite and street side photos of Poindexter’s Maryland house, immensely detailed biographies of him and his immediate family, and, until it was disconnected, his home phone number. The campaign to publicize Poindexter’s private life was promoted by the likes of Wired magazine and relied on a young generation skilled with technology—engineers as counter-establishment forces, a near-technocratic patricide.

Later, in his letter of resignation, Poindexter blamed the uproar on a simplistic media that can only deal in sound bites. The project, he said, was only to analyze the possibility of such a database. Synthetic or fictional data would be used for the study, and, besides, DARPA was an organization of “tool builders, not tool users.” His job would only be to develop TIA; Congress, he said, would decide whether or not to implement the plan.

James Der Derian, a Brown professor at the Watson Institute for International Studies who specializes in information security issues, calls Poindexter’s position naïve. According to Der Derian, whenever a new technology is developed, particularly one as expensive as TIA, a “bureaucratic inertia” forces it into use; no organization can create something without also creating irresistible pressures to implement it. The toolmaker cannot absolve himself from the tool user’s actions. Der Derian also notes that TIA would have to include some data, such as airline passenger lists, that regulations now prohibit being searched.

INTROVERTED FUTURIST

Despite the controversy over Total Information Awareness, which eventually adopted the slightly more euphemistic moniker of Terrorist Information Awareness, Poindexter held onto his job at DARPA until the next controversy. This time the problem was the proposed Policy Analysis Market, popularly referred to as the Terrorism Futures. PAM was a proposed futures market where people with expertise on the Middle East could place conditional bets on political events such as regime change in Jordan, or the assassination of Yasir Arafat. It was supposed to unite and process the knowledge of Middle East experts from academics, business, and government and generate predictions based on their cumulative bets, which could provide very real returns if correct.

The theory behind PAM is nothing new. A market is, some believe, the most effective way of assimilating information, and so-called predictive markets have been successful in other fields. Famously, a similar market set up to investigate the cause of the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster assigned blame correctly. According to the project’s web site, PAM was never intended to be a “terrorism futures market,” but was meant for strictly political events. Nevertheless, the unsavory implications led to another public outcry. Critics argued people could use the market to profit by predicting chaos; terrorists themselves could possibly use the market to manipulate federal intelligence or get government payouts from their own acts of terrorism. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld killed the proposal, and the light at the end of Poindexter’s tunnel began to fade.

Two weeks later, Poindexter resigned. In his letter of resignation he defended his projects as good ideas unfairly distorted and refers to himself as a “lightning rod” for criticism of DARPA and the IAO. His role in Iran-Contra, the specter of which has yet to fade from public memory, as well as his dispassionate persona, made criticism common and empathy rare. Despite his resignation, it is possible that Poindexter, the personification of stolidity, was not the motivating force behind TIA and PAM. Professor Der Derian believes those projects are the result of DARPA’s culture of divergent, out-of-the-box-thinking brought to bear on issues of national security.

Poindexter, at least, has always been consistent; his job was to dream up counterterrorism projects and he did it as well as he knew how; his resumé does call him as “goal-oriented.” His dissatisfaction for the establishment is understandable, in a way. It is morally consistent to create something like TIA and, caring only for solutions to problems, disregard questions of public reaction or eventual use; it is not morally consistent to order such projects and then drop them when the public dissents, leaving the engineer to take the fall. Poindexter’s role as commissioned architect was obscured by his role as, in his words, “lightning rod” for criticism.

The point is moot now. On September 29, six weeks after Poindexter’s resignation, Congress eliminated funding for the IAO, which had a budget of $150 million for 2003, including a proposed $10 million for TIA.

But the Admiral’s work is being continued, in part, under the auspices of John Ashcroft’s USA PATRIOT Act. “Patriot Act II” includes provisions to create a database to analyze DNA samples of suspected terrorists, broaden the definition of “terrorist support” to include mere association with suspect groups, and loosen the government’s restrictions on investigating and analyzing more people in counter-terrorism operations.

Sixteen years after Iran-Contra, Poindexter returned to public life to create ideas—technologies, not policies—that were so inherently unpopular they were torn apart as soon as they were made public. Poindexter alone went down with his ship, though not without denouncing its attackers. He also implicated his employers, in what could be seen as deferred justice visited on the worst kind of pragmatist, politics at its worst felling a savagely independent if politically naïve thinker, or a little bit of both.

PAUL LEVANDE B’07 is developing a highly efficient acronym for himself.