The Watchers

by Shane Harris

  172 Bob Popp had always wanted to work for DARPA, but the right job had yet to come along: I first met Popp in 2002, when he was working for John Poindexter at DARPA. I conducted interviews with him again in 2008. All statements, thoughts, and actions attributed to him here come from those interviews unless otherwise noted.

  In his e-mail Poindexter explained that he had read Popp’s proposal.

  174 McCarthy was incredulous. “No, John! You’re going to do this? No.” “Yes, I am,” Poindexter replied resolutely”: Interviews with Poindexter and Mary McCarthy. Her thoughts on TIA and Poindexter’s role also come from an interview.

  176 In one chart, Poindexter had used “profiling” to describe a method of screening particular individuals for terrorist characteristics: Interview with Popp.

  180 Lukasik assembled a group of academics: I interviewed Steve Lukasik about his work on red teams in 2008. Lukasik generously supplied access to documents chronicling the team’s work. Poindexter also described the concept and the team’s work in multiple interviews, as did Popp.

  CHAPTER 15: CALL TO ARMS

  All statements, thoughts, and actions attributed to John Poindexter in this chapter come from interviews unless otherwise noted.

  Poindexter described his meeting with Rumsfeld in detail, and on several occasions in interviews spoke about their history working together in the Pentagon. After the program attracted significant controversy in November 2002, Rumsfeld publicly acknowledged that he had met with Poindexter about Total Information Awareness. But, as detailed in subsequent chapters, he played down his knowledge of the program.

  187 It was the Information Dominance Center, former home of Erik Kleinsmith and the Able Danger team: Poindexter’s selection of the IDC as a home base for his network is documented in the IAO literature. I also discussed the selection of the site with Popp in interviews.

  188 Poindexter drew an impressive crowd for his first TIA briefing: Details of the meeting at the CIA come from interviews with Poindexter and an interview with Alan Wade in 2008.

  190 Fran Townsend seemed like she would know for sure: I interviewed Townsend in 2009 about her consultations with Poindexter. All statements, thoughts, and actions attributed to her in this chapter come from the interview and some follow-up questions via e-mail.

  193 Perhaps no one understood that better than Mike McConnell. As a former director of the National Security Agency: Poindexter and McConnell provided accounts of their meeting in separate interviews conducted in 2008 and 2009, respectively. They corroborated each other’s account, although McConnell was quick to emphasize that he was concerned Poindexter would end up creating dossiers of innocent people. Poindexter, in our interview, focused more on McConnell’s offer to pave a path with influential members of Congress, which McConnell confirmed he was willing to do, provided that he could give assurances Poindexter’s research was limited to foreign intelligence.

  195 Under a contract Poindexter awarded later that year, worth more than $8 million, Booz was tapped to help bring a prototype TIA system to life: A list of the contracts awarded by the Information Awareness Office is maintained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center. It is available at http://epic.org/privacy/profiling/tia/contractors_table.html.

  195 Bob Popp sat at his desk, thinking about a sandwich: Popp told me the story of how he designed the logo during an interview. Poindexter concurred that the logo was Popp’s inspiration and that he thought highly of it.

  197 The TIA network attracted new members every month: A brochure written to promote the network and detail its work lists the number of members that joined on a month-by-month basis. It was prepared after TIA was officially shut down and Poindexter had left government. The document is unclassified but it is not, to the best of my knowledge, publicly available. I obtained it from a private-sector source who was not employed by DARPA.

  197 At the beginning of his research experiments Poindexter drew a bright line in the kinds of data he would use: Interviews with Poindexter and Popp. McConnell confirmed that Poindexter told him the research would be divided into two paths. This is also spelled out in DARPA’s “Report to Congress Regarding the Terrorism Information Awareness Program” dated May 20, 2003.

  CHAPTER 16: FEED THE BAG

  200 Dr. J. C. Smart started his technical career at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory: Smart’s detailed biography is publicly available. Poindexter confirmed that he is the inventor of the BAG. Also, an internal document about a Homeland Security Department data-mining program, mentioned in a subsequent chapter, lists Smart as the creator of the BAG and details how it was used in the intelligence community.

  A number of other technical experts who were familiar with the BAG and the concept of graphic analysis provided valuable sources of background information for this chapter. In addition, a private-sector source who declined to be named, but who has direct knowledge of the NSA surveillance program, provided detailed information and documentation about how the technology was used in multiple interviews.

  201 James Payne, the head of Qwest Communications’ federal government business unit, accompanied the company’s chief executive to a business meeting with Hayden at his Fort Meade headquarters: Payne testified about this meeting to federal agents investigating Nacchio. Sections of the transcript of the interview are contained in the case documents for USA v. Nacchio. See particularly “Exhibit 1 to Mr. Nacchio’s Reply to SEC. 5 Submission,” which contains “FBI Form ‘302’ Regarding November 14, 2005, Interview of James F. X. Payne.”

  202 The CEO, Joe Nacchio, wanted a piece of a new NSA contract called Groundbreaker: This is detailed in Payne’s interview with federal authorities and in Nacchio’s case documents.

  202 Payne had made plenty of drop-in calls like this before to discuss potential business with large, important clients: See Payne’s interview with federal authorities.

  202 he was an old hand in the close-knit club of federal telecom contractors and agency executives: I covered the government telecommunications market as a technology reporter for Government Executive magazine, beginning in 2001. In that capacity, I met Payne and other executives with various companies.

  202 The company had allocated portions of its telecom network for the agency’s exclusive use: As I detail in my article “NSA Sought Data Before 9/11,” Qwest worked for the agency beginning at least in 1999. Internet number registration files showed that Qwest allocated a portion of its network that year to the Maryland Procurement Office, the NSA’s contracting unit. In March 2001, Payne sent an e-mail to colleagues noting that Qwest was already a “provider” of telecom services to the NSA through existing contracts.

  202 The agency was going after digital spies, not terrorists: This information came from an interview with a former White House official, who at the time was involved in network defense and other intelligence programs. This official told me in early 2001 that the NSA proposal to Qwest was “Can you build a private version of Echelon and tell us what you see?” Echelon is a name used within the intelligence community to refer to a signals-gathering-and-dissemination network operated by the NSA and its official counterparts in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.

  203 Government officials had also begun to fear a “digital Pearl Harbor”: One of the most prominent officials warning about such a catastrophe after 9/11 was Dick Clarke, who became the Bush administration’s “cyberczar.”

  203 It promised faster, more powerful data flows, and it caught the attention of senior U.S. military officials: This interest is documented in Nacchio’s trial documents. Also see “NSA Sought Data Before 9/11.” It was common knowledge among reporters covering technology in government that Qwest was making inroads with the defense and intelligence communities because of its high-speed network.

  203 In late 1997 a three-star general met with Nacchio at his Denver office and later told one of Nacchio’s associates that he wanted to use the company’s network “for government purposes”:
See Nacchio’s trial documents.

  204 Hayden’s proposal struck Nacchio, Payne, and Qwest’s lawyers as potentially illegal: Ibid.

  204 In the weeks after the attacks the NSA asked telecom executives for access to their customer records as well as direct, physical access to their data: This is based on my reporting of the request. See “More than Meets the Ear,” in National Journal on March 18, 2006, and “Tinker, Tailor, Miner, Spy” in Slate. See also “NSA Has Massive Database of Americans’ Phone Calls,” by Leslie Cauley, published in USA Today on May 11, 2006.

  204 If analysts started with a list of phone numbers, they could find all the other numbers called from those phones, and so establish the close circle of people in the targets’ daily lives: Recall that this is what the Parentage tool that Erik Kleinsmith used during Able Danger was designed to do. The NSA was using that tool before 9/11 to trace the locations of cyberhacks—the same kind of intelligence it wanted Qwest to help provide before the terrorist attacks.

  205 Agency officials rebutted by questioning the company’s patriotism. They let it be known that Qwest’s competitors were already on board: See my previous reporting in Slate and National Journal, as well as USA Today’s article.

  205 Lawyers for telecom and Internet companies were working overtime to comply with the government requests: A number of said lawyers agreed to describe their work complying with these requests on the condition that they not be identified by name. They also didn’t disclose the names of their clients.

  206 The Treasury team, dubbed Operation Green Quest, was specifically interested in a money-moving system called hawala: Interview with Marcy Forman, head of Green Quest, in 2002. See my story “Disrupt and Dismantle,” published in Government Executive magazine in February 2002.

  206 The FBI unit, called the Financial Review Group, set out to discover the financial linkages that tied the nineteen hijackers to one another and to their sources: See “Disrupt and Dismantle.”

  207 FBI agents also dove into credit and debit card histories housed at First Data in Colorado: See Ron Suskind’s The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America’s Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006). I also interviewed a former Justice Department official who worked in an FBI command center immediately after the 9/11 attacks, helping to track financial information.

  207 A unit at the Customs Bureau in Northern Virginia also joined the fray: See “Disrupt and Dismantle.”

  208 But financial data was also poured into the BAG and overlapped with phone and e-mail communications in an effort to dig deeper into terrorists’ social networks: Interviews with private-sector source who had direct knowledge of the BAG and the NSA’s surveillance activities.

  208 It plugged into an array of data sources, including those at AT&T, one of the oldest and most important telecom providers: The most well-known source for this information is a former AT&T employee named Mark Klein, who went public with a set of documents that he said showed a secret facility meant to siphon off customer data at an AT&T site in San Francisco.

  Separately, a former senior administration official confirmed to me that the company was supplying the NSA with massive amounts of communication data. In the words of this official, the agency was making a “mirror” of AT&T’s databases.

  Also see Leslie Cauley’s article in USA Today, “NSA Has Massive Database of Americans’ Phone Calls,” May 11, 2006. Citing sources with direct knowledge of the arrangement, Cauley wrote that “the National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T” and other companies. At the time, AT&T responded to the USA Today story with a written statement: “We do not comment on matters of national security, except to say that we only assist law enforcement and government agencies charged with protecting national security in strict accordance with the law.”

  Also see James Bamford’s The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America (New York: Doubleday, 2008), in which he offers a technical description of how information from AT&T’s networks was provided to the NSA.

  208 What to do with it—how to make sense of it—that’s what mattered most: This is a general problem in all kinds of analysis of massive amounts of data, regardless of the agency. But the NSA’s problems in particular were conveyed to me by sources with knowledge of its work and were also highlighted in the 2009 report by five inspectors general, who concluded that the NSA program was of limited use. See “Report on the President’s Surveillance Program,” released on July 10, 2009.

  CHAPTER 17: SHIPS PASSING IN THE NIGHT

  210 Poindexter secured a meeting with Bill Black, Hayden’s number two and a career NSA employee: Poindexter provided me with calendar entries as well as e-mails from NSA employees confirming his meetings with Black and Michael Hayden.

  211 There he learned that a large percentage of phone calls, no matter which carrier generated them, passed through AT&T circuits: Interview with Poindexter in 2008.

  211 Poindexter told Black that he wanted the NSA on his network: Ibid. Documentation obtained independently of Poindexter and his staff confirms that the NSA joined the network and eventually added more nodes than any other agency. This information is contained in an unclassified description of the Total Information Awareness network.

  211 Instead of just monitoring individual targets, the terrorist hunters began to look for patterns: See “More than Meets the Ear,” my article in National Journal, March 18, 2006. This account is based on interviews with government and private-sector officials about the NSA’s surveillance activities.

  212 Rather than leading them to sleeper agents, the NSA’s intelligence usually led them to the doorstep of an innocent American, or a Pizza Hut: “Spy Agency Data After Sept. 11 Led F.B.I. to Dead Ends,” by Lowell Bergman, Eric Lichtblau, Scott Shane, and Don Van Natta, Jr., New York Times, January 17, 2006.

  212 “I don’t need this,” the official said. “I just need you to tell me whose ass to put a Hellfire missile on”: Interview with said CIA official, who asked not to be named. This individual had direct responsibility for the agency’s counterterrorism program.

  212 Poindexter knew that had long been the agency’s problem: Interview with Poindexter. Even though he wasn’t read into the agency’s terrorist surveillance program, it was no secret that the NSA had been grappling with this problem for some time.

  212 Exactly seven weeks later, on March 25, Poindexter went back to the fort and sat down with Mike Hayden: Calendar entries and e-mails provided by Poindexter.

  CHAPTER 18: FULL STEAM AHEAD

  214 Once the first node was installed on the TIA network, in early 2002, Poindexter set out an ambitious schedule to enlarge his laboratory and build a working TIA prototype: The “Report to Congress Regarding the Terrorism Information Awareness Program,” among other unclassified program documents and descriptions from the Information Awareness Office, charts the progression of the technology experiments. Additionally, a brochure I obtained from a source outside of Poindexter’s office lists a chronology and gives the wind-based code name of every experiment as well as a description of what it entailed. Poindexter and Popp were able to amplify this information with other details during interviews.

  214 Paul Polski, an old Navy Academy classmate, called Poindexter for help on an ambitious project to screen millions of airline passengers against terrorist watch lists and intelligence databases: Interview with Poindexter. I also interviewed Polski about his career in 2003.

  216 The FBI hired ChoicePoint, a data-aggregation firm based outside Atlanta, to give agents access to billions of records on nearly every person inside the United States: Under the Freedom of Information Act I obtained contract documents that detail the arrangement between the bureau and ChoicePoint. See my story in National Journal, “The Private Spy Among us,” published on November 5, 2005.

  216 The TIA researchers nicknamed the database Ali Baba, after the Ar
abian folk character who opens a cave full of hidden treasure with the magic words “open sesame”: Interviews with Poindexter and Popp.

  216 Simulated intelligence was also used to create ever more complicated synthetic worlds for testing the red team’s attack templates: Ibid.

  217 NSA analysts did remove the experimental data crunching, linking, and extracting tools from the TIA network and quietly put them into service as part of the agency’s warrantless surveillance regime: Interview with private-sector source who had direct knowledge of the NSA’s terrorist surveillance program. Poindexter and Popp said they were unaware of what any agency did with the tools once they were removed from the network. They said they had no knowledge of those tools being used for the NSA’s secret program.

  219 The Highlands Forum was created in 1994: For a vivid history of the Highlands Forum, complete with descriptions of the Carmel locale, see Brian Friel’s article “Start Your Engines,” published in Government Executive magazine in May 15, 2006. Also see the transcript of an April 5, 2001, interview with O’Neill on the Highlands Forum process held at the Center for Information Policy Research at Harvard University, http://pirp.harvard.edu/pubs_pdf/o%27neill/o%27neill-i01-3.pdf.

  220 But O’Neill had paired him up with an outsider, a thirty-eight-year-old computer software designer from Las Vegas named Jeff Jonas: Unless otherwise noted all statements, thoughts, and actions attributed to Jonas, as well as the details of his career, come from an interview I conducted with him in 2008.