The Short Life, Public Execution and Resurrection of John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness

Was it an Orwellian nightmare or an intelligence savior? John Poindexter says TIA was sucked into a vortex of politics and knee-jerk foolishness before anyone could answer that question.

The connotations associated with his name are legion, but the one that doesn't readily spring to mind is that of Poindexter as technocrat. Today he appears ruggedly fit in a way that belies his age (68). He looks distinctly trimmer than the man who testified before Congress nearly 20 years ago, wearing Navy dress blues that somehow made him look more like a sedentary CEO than an intrepid sailor. His tan now sets off a white dustbroom mustache. He is sharp-eyed and slightly wary in his manner. But when he steps outside into the bright California sunshine, producing a pipe and beginning to work its barrel, he rhapsodizes about sailing his yacht and looks every bit the Navy admiral.

Nonetheless, he is also a bona fide geek. Enthusiastic about new technologies, Poindexter is devoted to the idea that ambitious, creative IT systems can help solve complex problems such as the risks posed by asymmetrical terrorist threats. "The 9/11 Commission is identifying the exact problems that we were trying to get technology to solve. So I keep pushing the idea," he says.

Yet, ideas like TIA must negotiate the roiling confluence of security and technology with democratic principles, including privacy rights. Can the nation strike a balance? (See "With Liberty and Surveillance for All," www.csoonline.com/printlinks.) Where is the line between security and invasions of privacy? To what extent should citizens control intelligence activities that probe data about their lives?

These are some of the questions that we were curious to pose to Poindexter, who until recently has been largely absent from the debate that his DARPA initiatives triggered. "I think it is very difficult today to have a reasoned public discourse on any controversial subject," says Poindexter with characteristic understatement. "Certainly, election years present a complicating factor."TIA's OriginsThe generative spark for TIA was John Hinckley Jr.'s attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan in March 1981. Poindexter, who was then a White House military assistant (he became national security adviser in 1985), credits that event with getting him and others thinking about the problem of "crisis preplanning." Poindexter set up a crisis preplanning group at the White House, as an adjunct to the Situation Room. Spurred by the assassination attempt and subsequent events like the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, its scope soon widened. The group considered terrorism scenarios even then, and explored the tantalizing possibility that ambitious data analysis might reveal the outlines of future events. However, after the Iran-Contra affair, which eventually led to Poindexter's conviction on five felony counts, including lying to Congress about it (a conviction that was subsequently overturned), crisis preplanning efforts stalled.