The Watchers

by Shane Harris

  When Poindexter opened the Information Awareness Office he learned that the privacy study was up for consideration. He immediately agreed to sponsor it.

  The final report was due out in December, but the panel held a number of meetings to generate ideas. It gave them a chance to put Poindexter’s concept through closer scrutiny.

  That summer the panelists invited Fran Townsend to attend a meeting. Poindexter was pleased to have her, since she’d been frank about the legal hurdles he faced yet generally agreed that his concept was solid. But the group also brought in some sharp skeptics, a pair of noted electronic privacy experts, including one of the toughest Poindexter would ever face.

  His name was Marc Rotenberg, and he had an abiding institutional memory of the government’s historic forays into citizens’ private lives. A graduate of Harvard College and Stanford Law, Rotenberg cut his teeth as counsel to Senator Patrick Leahy on the Judiciary Committee. He was currently the president and executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, EPIC, which had been at the center of the privacy debate since 1994. The group was established to alert the public to emerging threats against the Constitution, particularly those rising from the ever-expanding stores of personal data compiled by corporations and the government. EPIC had a broad mandate, and at times it seemed kept alive solely by Rotenberg’s unceasing and humorless work ethic. He was a tireless activist and frequent speaker, as at home providing congressional testimony as he was giving sound bites to reporters. If Poindexter really wanted to be challenged, there was no one better for the job.

  The meeting convened at the Institute for Defense Analysis, a Washington think tank. Poindexter noticed that Rotenberg didn’t say much during the formal discussions. So he approached him during the breaks.

  “We need your help thinking about how to provide security and privacy,” Poindexter said. Rotenberg said he understood, and he thought increased oversight would help. Poindexter seemed to think they were on the same page there, since he wanted TIA to monitor its own users. That was a kind of oversight, he thought.

  Poindexter wasn’t sure Rotenberg was with him on that. And he didn’t think Rotenberg had given him, or the panel, any constructive suggestions.

  The meeting lasted several hours. No one shouted. And no one told Poindexter to scuttle his project. But it was hard to imagine how anyone could. The privacy study was restricted to the question of whether technology could protect privacy. It didn’t ask whether the government should build the ever more powerful data aggregators that, everyone agreed, posed a threat to privacy in the first place.

  As far as Poindexter was concerned, he had opened the floor to debate. But the panel’s final report suggested that it was already on his side. “Our thesis is that technology can allow us to make substantial progress towards supporting both privacy and national security,” the authors wrote, placing special emphasis on the win-win approach that Poindexter himself had advocated. The study recommended “key technical strategies” for protecting innocent people’s data. They were all concepts that Poindexter had been pitching for months. Selective revelation and the immutable audit log topped the panel’s list.

  The panelists were genuinely qualified to assess the concepts. Poindexter believed that he had invited criticism; Rotenberg had the chance to chime in. As far as Poindexter was concerned, he had made the effort and the overture. He was sparking the policy debate he wanted to have.

  The report’s authors noted that policy questions came up in their meetings, but that they had been a peripheral matter. The group was convened only to assess technology, not the larger questions that people like Rotenberg had been debating for years. “Our policy discussion should be understood with caution—we have no special expertise in policy.”

  One could ask why the panel had convened at all if they weren’t prepared to tackle the controversy head-on. It wasn’t in their charter. But in the months to come Poindexter would cite this review as a kind of vindication. Experts—technical experts—had weighed in and found that his ideas had merit.

  Rotenberg didn’t see it that way. He might have kept his powder dry in that private meeting, but on the outside, he and his cohort were preparing for battle. And several months after the meeting, when TIA suddenly caught the attention of the country’s most important newspaper, the war cry sounded. That’s when things started to fall apart.

  CHAPTER 19

  THE UNRAVELING

  On November 14, 2002, Bob Popp sat down at his desk, opened his e-mail in-box, and found a string of panicked messages from friends and colleagues. They all asked the same question: “Did you see the following?”

  It was Bill Safire’s weekly column in the New York Times. Safire, a former speechwriter for Richard Nixon and one of the country’s most widely read conservative libertarians, had just gotten wind of Poindexter’s new project. And under the headline “You Are a Suspect,” he sounded an alarm.

  “The supersnoop’s dream,” Safire called it. “ ‘ Total Information Awareness’ about every U.S. citizen.” The Pentagon was building “a computerized dossier on your private life,” he wrote, the likes of which battle-worn privacy activists like Safire had never seen. The Times’s John Markoff had first reported about TIA less than a week earlier; he had quoted Marc Rotenberg, who called the system “the perfect storm for civil liberties in America.” The Washington Post followed with a story. But Safire felt that editorial writers had not fully grasped the ramifications of Poindexter’s new undertaking.

  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, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend—all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as “a virtual, centralized grand database.”

  “This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario,” Safire cautioned his readers. “It is what will happen to your personal freedom in the next few weeks if John Poindexter gets the unprecedented power he seeks.”

  Popp’s first reaction was not to worry. He thought Safire was full of crap, that he’d got his facts wrong and mischaracterized TIA. And of course he’d seized on Poindexter’s checkered history. (“This ring-knocking master of deceit is back again with a plan even more scandalous than Iran-contra,” Safire wrote.) Nothing to fear, Popp told his worried friends. It will all blow over.

  But over the next few days Poindexter was flooded with interview requests from reporters. All the major media outlets. The morning talk shows. They all wanted to put the elusive admiral on television. Maybe this was a bigger deal than I thought, Popp told himself.

  Poindexter and his staff started living day to day, waiting for the news cycle to burn itself out. But the further reporters dug, the more incriminating evidence they found to support Safire’s allegations. It didn’t matter if he had mischaracterized Poindexter’s intentions, or even that he’d gotten some of the facts wrong in his column. They had Poindexter’s own words to use against him.

  At the DARPATech conference in Anaheim Poindexter talked about treating distributed stores of information “as if they were one centralized database.” People seemed to think he wanted to hoard private information in a single government warehouse. And then there was the logo, with the intimidating Latin motto Scientia est potentia emblazoned under an all-seeing eye. The illustration, with its Masonic overtones, appeared on dozens of Web sites within days. It was mocked, reviled, and instantly turned into a weapon. Privacy activists could scarcely believe their luck. Was Poindexter really so politically tone-deaf? He had practically handed them a sword to cut his legs out from under him. The Washington Post editorial board observed, “Anyone who deliberately set out to invent a government program with the specific aim of terrifying the Orwell-reading public could hardly have improved on the Information Awareness Office.”

  Poindexter and Popp knew th
ings had taken a bad turn when, in addition to press calls, inquiries came in from the Pentagon. Congressional oversight staff had been calling. Lawmakers had sent over lists of questions. They wanted details. Just what in the hell was Poindexter doing over there at DARPA?

  He decided to tell them in person.

  “I cannot stand confusion.” Truer words Poindexter never wrote.

  He offered that candid assessment in a personal essay penned as a midshipman at Annapolis. The three-page reflection, audaciously titled “Portrait of the Ensign as a Young Man,” was Poindexter’s attempt to explain how a rural kid from the Midwest, with no knowledge of military tradition, had not only chosen to attend a service academy but excelled there. There was no simple answer, he concluded. It had a lot to do with discipline. He knew when to work, and when to play. He was a fast learner with a good memory, which made coursework easy. And he thought he was a born leader. But above all those traits, “order and organization” had gotten him this far. They were his “guiding principles,” he wrote, and probably the biggest reason why he found the Navy so appealing.

  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. He had prepared a three-hour presentation for an audience that demanded quick answers. After about fifteen minutes Popp, who had accompanied him, realized that Poindexter hadn’t used the word “privacy” yet. The audience was getting restless.

  “Hey!” a Senate staffer piped up, interrupting Poindexter. “When are you going to start talking about the reason you’re here?”

  Poindexter was taken aback. “Get to the data mining!” the staffer insisted. He’d read the news reports, he said. He knew what Poindexter was after. Personal information. Financial transactions. That was the issue.

  Poindexter assured the staffer he would get to the privacy components, in due course. But first people needed context. They needed the full picture.

  The staffer pushed back. He said that he wanted answers now. That’s what these people had come to hear.

  “Will you sit down!” Poindexter snapped. Popp was shaken. He’d never seen his boss lose his cool. He didn’t know he could. “I’ll get to it. But I’m not going to let you drive the agenda!”

  The staffer stayed quiet, and Poindexter continued with his presentation.

  The last time he had squared off against a room like this he was sitting behind the witness table. Things hadn’t gone much better in this repeat performance. Word of his outburst filtered back to the Pentagon, and to the office of Donald Rumsfeld. There would be no more speeches. No interviews. The secretary of defense ordered Poindexter gagged.

  The assault came quickly. Calls for Poindexter’s resignation emanated from Capitol Hill. A few days after his appearance Senator Charles Schumer sent a letter to Rumsfeld, urging him to fire Poindexter. Appearing on a Sunday morning talk show, Schumer called TIA the latest example of intrusive and excessive counterterrorism policies concocted by the Bush administration. The Patriot Act, military tribunals for terrorist suspects, Attorney General John Ashcroft’s idea to enlist postal workers and electricity meter readers as neighborhood lookouts. They were all building toward a disturbing end, Schumer said. “If we need a big brother, John Poindexter is the last guy on the list that I would choose.”

  The next day Rotenberg called a press conference to raise awareness of TIA. He called it the “hub” of a far-reaching effort by the government to “extend surveillance of the American public.” And Poindexter was “the architect of a program to extend surveillance of private databases” that went back almost twenty years. Rotenberg pointed to that 1984 policy directive on computer security that Poindexter had written in the White House, the one critics said would establish a powerful “computer czar” in the government. Poindexter had been Big Brother all along, Rotenberg seemed to say. TIA was merely the fulfillment of a dream. When the Pentagon refused to turn over documents about Poindexter’s program, Rotenberg sued the government under the Freedom of Information Act.

  In the withering critique of TIA, two themes emerged. First, there was the program itself, the latest example of the Bush administration’s excess and zeal in the war on terror. More than a year had passed without another act of terrorism on U.S. soil, and yet the government was relentlessly determined to expand the corners of the battlefield. Total Information Awareness, with its creepy logo and absurd premise, was hardly a surprise.

  But the man behind it. He came with a longer history. Poindexter was a liar. A shill. One couldn’t utter the words “total information awareness” without mentioning Iran-Contra as well. It was only fitting that Poindexter, the poster child of governmental overreach, should be in charge. People worried about TIA. But they distrusted Poindexter. And why not? After all, as Safire pointed out in his column, “a jury found he spoke falsely before.”

  Poindexter emerged as a caricature. A boogeyman. Two days after Rotenberg’s press conference, a columnist for the independent San Francisco Weekly turned the tables on the supersnoop, publishing Poindexter’s phone number, along with satellite images of his house, all of which the writer found on the Internet. Why, he asked, was Poindexter’s “$269,700 Rockville, Md., house covered with artificial siding, according to Maryland tax records? Shouldn’t a Reagan conspirator be able to afford repainting every seven years?” The columnist also published the names and addresses of Poindexter’s neighbors, demonstrating that innocent people could be ensnared in a dragnet flung at one man.

  Strangers started calling the house. Poindexter installed a call-blocking device. Unable to speak for himself, he waited for someone to defend him.

  But the White House deflected inquiries about TIA and what the president knew about it. Only Bush and a few senior staff knew that over at Fort Meade the kind of snooping machine being pilloried in the press was actually cranking away. The White House stayed quiet, even after Poindexter personally briefed the vice president’s staff on TIA and his intentions.

  The Defense Department had authorized TIA and committed nearly a quarter billion dollars in funding over three years. Some in Poindexter’s office hoped that Rumsfeld or his lieutenants, some of whom had known Poindexter for years, might set the record straight.

  A few days before Schumer called upon Rumsfeld to fire Poindexter, the defense secretary gave an in-flight press briefing en route to an international defense ministerial meeting. He took questions about his old friend’s new work, which they’d discussed over lunch earlier that year.

  “I don’t know much about it,” Rumsfeld said. “And what I do know, I’m not sure I understand completely, which is not surprising.” He threw water on the “hype and the alarm” over TIA, and said he hadn’t seen much negative press on it. It was just a research program, not an intelligence-gathering operation.

  So much for the program. How about the man? In one deft move, befitting a champion wrestler and Washington knife fighter, Rumsfeld dispensed with that problem too.

  “I have met Poindexter. I don’t remember him much, though. I had known him years and years and years ago when he was in a junior position. And he explained to me what he was doing at DARPA, 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. Anyone with any concern ought to be able to sleep well tonight.”

  Poindexter’s junior position was as the assistant to the head of the Navy. That casual conversation was a private luncheon during which both men fondly reminisced about glory days and shared their ideas. If Rumusfeld didn’t remember much about Poindexter, perhaps it was because he had only recently forgotten it.

  CHAPTER 20

  GOING BLACK

  They’re not after you, John. They’re after Rumsfeld and the president.

  That was the message that John Hamre brought back to his friend Poindexter after a scouting mission on the Hill. Not long after the Safire column appeared, Hamre, the er
stwhile deputy defense secretary, had tried to discern what lay underneath the outrage over TIA. It was pretty grim, he reported, but it wasn’t just about the program. Poindexter had become a lightning rod for Congress and the public’s growing frustrations with the Bush administration. Attorney General John Ashcroft had publicly told members that they emboldened America’s enemies by questioning the president’s policies, which included some increasingly invasive counterterrorism measures. The administration had publicly toyed with the idea of enlisting mail carriers and electricity meter checkers as citizen “tipsters.” They were building airline passenger profiling systems and watch lists. The components of the Big Brother society were falling into place. People were afraid. They were angry. And then along came Poindexter. He was an easy target.

  And a legitimate one. Poindexter had hit a nerve, much like Hamre’s experiments with the Information Dominance Center years earlier. The China experiment and the Able Danger program had all gone down amid howls about domestic spying, privacy infringement, and illegal data collection. Hamre, now the head of a renowned Washington think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, had been advising Poindexter, trying to help him avoid those pitfalls. But the furor over Able Danger had been confined to a small circle of insiders. TIA had enraged an entire public.

  Poindexter thought that his critics had condemned his idea simply because he was in charge of it. His history and his ambition were locked in a grudge match. With “he lied to Congress” as a perennial footnote, Poindexter could not escape himself. As one senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute put it at a press conference in December, “The concern is not that he is not the right man for the job. The problem is that he may be the right man.”