The Pentagon's Brain (35 page)

But when the Berlin Wall came down, Armour saw new threats cropping up everywhere. “People then were talking giddily about a ‘peace dividend,’” he told a group of DARPA technologists at a conference in 2002, but reminded the audience that his former boss at the CIA, James Woolsey, knew better. “Woolsey pointedly said that while the ‘big bad bear’ was gone, the woods were still filled with lots of poisonous snakes,” Armour said. The terrorists
had since emerged as the new snakes, “what we now call the asymmetric threat.” Armour believed that the job of the twenty-first-century intelligence analyst was to find the snakes, using computers.

Humans were frail. As technical collectors, they could be manipulated either by assets trying to give them bad information or by their own biases and mental blocks. This weakness “has long been called ‘deception and denial’ in intelligence circles,” Armour said. Genoa II’s predecessor, Genoa, was about making the machines smarter. Each machine had been overseen by what was called a “Lone Ranger,” a single intelligence analyst. With Genoa II, Armour wanted to get “smarter results.” He wanted “cognitive amplification.” Smarter machines and smarter humans.

Armour created what he called “bumper sticker phrases” that captured Genoa II’s automation goals, phrases that read like words George Orwell could have written in the dystopian novel
Nineteen Eighty-Four
because they sounded like doublethink. “Read everything without reading everything,” Armour told Genoa II analysts. “There is too much that must be read to actually read.” Armour also said that TIA analysts would need to “begin the trip to computers as servants, to partners, to mentors,” meaning that analysts needed first to view their computers as assistants and eventually view them as advisors. Ultimately, Genoa II’s computers would know more than a human could know.

As John von Neumann had predicted on his deathbed in “The Computer and the Brain,” the “artificial automaton” would one day be able to
think.
TIA was a system of information systems that could read everything without reading everything. It was a system of systems that could observe and then connect everything the human eye could not see.

On January 14, 2002, the Information Awareness Office opened its doors, temporarily, on the fourth floor of the DARPA office
building at 3710 North Fairfax Drive in Arlington, while John Poindexter worked to secure an independent facility where TIA analysts could settle permanently. One of the first people Poindexter would visit was Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Over lunch in Rumsfeld’s office in the Pentagon, the two men discussed TIA. It was agreed that DARPA would build the system, then help its customers get the system up and running. The customers were the CIA, FBI, and NSA, but also the service agencies. Tether felt that the best place to house the new Total Information Awareness system was at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, a division of the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command, INSCOM.

Tony Tether set up a meeting with INSCOM’s commanding officer, Lieutenant General Keith Alexander. At Fort Belvoir, Alexander ran his operations out of a facility known as the Information Dominance Center, with an unusual interior design that deviated significantly from traditional military decor. The Information Dominance Center had been designed by Academy Award–winning Hollywood set designer Bran Ferren to simulate the bridge of the Starship
Enterprise,
from the
Star Trek
television and film series. There were ovoid-shaped chairs, computer stations inside highly polished chrome panels, even doors that slid open with a whooshing sound. Alexander would sit in the leather captain’s chair, positioned in the center of the command post, where he could face the Information Dominance Center’s twenty-four-foot television monitor. General Alexander loved the science-fiction genre. INSCOM staff even wondered if the general fancied himself a real-life Captain Kirk.

An arrangement was made between DARPA and INSCOM whereby General Alexander gave John Poindexter and his team an area to work out of inside the Information Dominance Center. “The initial TIA experiment was done at INSCOM, worldwide command,” says Bob Popp. “The plan was to have attachments, or nodes, across the world. Multiple agencies would work on multiple
problems.” Poindexter began inviting other agencies to work alongside TIA as collaborators. One by one they joined, including the CIA, NSA, and FBI.

Poindexter believed that another attack was already well along in its planning phase. It could happen at any time. Many other senior officials were motivated by the same fear.

“We felt as if we were really battling terrorism,” says Popp. “The network grew. We set up another node in Germany.” The future of TIA seemed bright. Then suddenly, as Bob Popp recalls, “we had our own battle, with Congress.”

In August 2002, John Poindexter unveiled TIA at the DARPATech conference in Anaheim, California. This technology conference marked the beginning of the program’s public end. In November 2002, a
New York Times
headline read “Pentagon Plans a Computer System That Would Peek at Personal Data of Americans.” Reporter John Markoff wrote that the Department of Defense had initiated a massive computer-based domestic surveillance program, “a vast electronic dragnet, searching for personal information as part of the hunt for terrorists around the globe—including the United States… without a search warrant.” Markoff named DARPA as the agency in charge, and reported that the computer system was called Total Information Awareness. The logo of the Information Awareness Office became the focus of much ire. It featured the Eye of Providence icon—the same as the one on the back of the dollar bill—casting a searchlight over a globe. DARPA’s Latin motto,
Scientia Est Potentia,
or “Knowledge Is Power,” fueled its own comparisons to George Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Several days later, columnist William Safire wrote about TIA, focusing on the fact that John Poindexter, of the Iran-Contra affair scandal, was its director. The Pentagon had given a “disgraced admiral… a $200 million budget to create computer dossiers on 300 million Americans,” Safire wrote, listing the myriad of
electronic transactions a person makes in any day, week, or year: “Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive.” If DARPA got its way, the TIA program would be able to monitor them all. “This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario,” Safire wrote. “It is what will happen to your personal freedom in the next few weeks if John Poindexter gets the unprecedented power he seeks.”

When Safire’s column ran, TIA’s existence had been a matter of public knowledge for seven months but no one had paid much attention to it. In the thirty days after Safire’s column appeared, there were 285 stories about TIA, the majority of which were overwhelmingly negative. Many of the articles focused on the $200 million figure cited by Safire. In a press conference on November 20, Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology Edward “Pete” Aldridge stated that the budget for the TIA system was $10 million through the 2003 fiscal year. This was highly inaccurate. According to records from the Defense Technical Information Center comptroller’s office, the actual budget for the Information Awareness Office through fiscal year 2003 was $586.4 million. The true numbers had been concealed inside other DARPA Research, Development, Test and Evaluation budgeting. Although the numbers controversy wouldn’t be revealed for months, the privacy concerns took center stage.

Americans wanted answers. Lawmakers sent a list of questions for DARPA. John Poindexter was sent to Capitol Hill, where he was expected to clarify details about TIA to roughly fifty members of Congress and their staff. Bob Popp went too. “Me, Poindexter, Tony [Tether], and our Hill liaison went to the Hill to brief the House and Senate,” Popp recalled in 2014. Their meeting with the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence “went well,” Popp says. “Questions, answers, fine.” Then they moved on to the Senate Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

At the Senate, Poindexter began his testimony with a background of his own personal history, starting with his early education at a military academy. After roughly fifteen minutes, a Senate staffer shouted out, “Hey, when are you going to start talking about the reason you’re here?”

“Poindexter said, ‘If you’ll just give me a chance—’” Popp recalls.

At which point, Poindexter was interrupted by another staffer.

“What’s all this invasion of privacy!” someone else yelled.

Popp says, “John Poindexter was polite, but stern.”

“Get to the data mining!” the staffer yelled, which infuriated Poindexter.

The staffer shouted, “We want answers now!”

Which is when John Poindexter lost his composure. “Will you sit down!” he shouted back, far too loudly. Then, “I’m not going to let you drive the agenda!”

Poindexter gave the rest of his presentation, but word of what had happened was already making its way back to the Pentagon. It was the beginning of the end of TIA. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was brought into the loop. What was DARPA to do? Rumsfeld issued an order. John Poindexter was not to speak to anyone. No interviews with anyone from Congress. No interviews with the press.

Poindexter’s second fall from grace happened quickly. With him went the program, at least as far as the public was told. A multitude of newspaper articles generated a further wave of public outcry, including over the fact that the Pentagon had allocated a quarter of a billion dollars for TIA through 2005. Poindexter was portrayed as a villain and DARPA was cast as a surveillance machine.

A reporter asked Secretary Rumsfeld about TIA. “I don’t know much about it,” Rumsfeld answered. Poindexter “explained to me what he was doing at DARPA,” he said, “but it was a casual conversation. I haven’t been briefed on it; I’m not knowledgeable about
it. Anyone who is concerned ought not be.” When asked about Poindexter the man, Rumsfeld said he didn’t “remember him much.” Rumsfeld told the reporter that, as was often the case with the American public, there was far too much “hype and alarm.” Of the surveillance program Rumsfeld said, “Anyone with any concern ought to be able to sleep well tonight.” TIA was a research program, he clarified, not an intelligence-gathering operation.

In the wake of the scandal, the Total Information Awareness program was briefly renamed the Terrorism Information Awareness program, but the public controversy did not die down. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made it clear that John Poindexter would resign or be fired. Ultimately, Poindexter offered his resignation to Tony Tether and told reporters he was leaving DARPA and looking forward to spending more time sailing on the Chesapeake Bay. Secretary Rumsfeld then went back to making plans to invade Iraq.

Months later, in the fall of 2003, Congress eliminated funding for the Total Information Awareness program, saying it was “concerned about the activities of the Information Awareness Office.” The House and Senate jointly directed “that the Office be terminated immediately.”

But “the [TIA] programs did not end,” Bob Popp explained in 2014. Instead, many of the clandestine electronic surveillance programs were classified and transferred to NSA, DHS, CIA, and the military services. Program names were changed. Certain members of Congress were cleared to know about some of them, but not all of them. Major elements of DARPA’s Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery (EELD) and Genoa II programs, including the physical nodes that already existed at INSCOM and in Germany, were folded into a classified NSA system called PRISM—a massive covert electronic surveillance and data-mining program that would create an international uproar in 2013 after NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked thousands of pages of classified documents to the press.

Some DARPA programs with public faces were transferred to the Department of Homeland Security, including the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS), Activity Recognition and Monitoring (ARM), and Human Identification at a Distance (HumanID). These programs, managed by the Office of Biometric Identity Management and the TSA, oversaw identity recognition software systems at airports and borders, and in public transportation systems and other public spaces.

For use abroad, other TIA programs were transferred to the Army for its Biometrically Enabled Intelligence programs, meant ultimately to collect biometrics on foreign individuals using eye scans, fingerprint scans, and facial scans. And the CIA initiated a program called Anonymous Entity Resolution, based on TIA’s Scalable Social Network Analysis (SSNA), examining links between individuals through electronic systems like ATM withdrawals and hotel reservations.

For use in future war zones, DARPA recycled some of the most invasive TIA surveillance and data-mining technologies into a program designed for video collection, pattern analysis, and targeting acquisition for use in military operations in urban terrain. This program was called Combat Zones That See.

Any future invasion strategy needed a “new strategic context,” according to Secretary Rumsfeld. Future wars would be fought according to DARPA’s system of systems concept—advanced weapons platforms linked by a network of advanced computer systems. In 2003 this could not exactly be sold to the American people as “Assault Breaker Warfare,” which would require a paragraph of explanation and sounded dull. Rumsfeld had been thinking about articulating a new strategic context for the Department of Defense ever since he took office, and shortly after the 9/11 attacks he tasked the job of choosing a name to retired vice admiral Arthur Cebrowski, director of the Office of Force Transformation.

The Office of Force Transformation was an in-house Pentagon think tank personally created by Rumsfeld in the wake of 9/11. The mandate of this new office was “to challenge the status quo with new concepts for American defense to ensure an overwhelming and continuing competitive advantage.” The name that the Office of Force Transformation came up with for this new way of waging war was “network-centric warfare.” It was a phrase DARPA had been using for years, based on its Assault Breaker concept back in 1974. Soon the whole world would start hearing about network-centric warfare. When Secretary Rumsfeld presented the Pentagon’s “Transformation Planning Guidance” to the president in the winter of 2003, he summed up the way forward as “drawing upon unparalleled Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) capabilities.” So much had changed since the days of command and control.