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.

Fast-forward to 1996. DARPA issued what is known grandly as a Broad Agency Announcement, or BAA. These are exactly what they sound like: proclamations or calls to arms for some broad problem the agency intends to research. In this case, says Poindexter, the BAA announced that DARPA wanted to develop information technologies that would help "identify potential future crises and our options for preemption and preventionwhich sounded a lot like what we had been doing in the 1980s," says Poindexter.

Eventually, the BAA led to Project Genoa in 1997. That research, which later morphed into TIA, was meant to encompass many specific projects under the one umbrella. The data mining application that most people associate with TIA was simply one of the most prominent projects.

"Now, you've got to understand that in the R&D environment, you try to generalize problems, make them as expansive as possible, so that the technology you develop will have broad applicability," Poindexter says. "Nobodymyself includedbelieves that we could ever achieve total information awareness. But the government needs to set goals and long-range objectives. Total information awareness is a good [research] goal."

In large part, the I in TIA refers to information about transactions. Poindexter had been thinking, as early as the crisis preplanning days in the Reagan White House, that terrorist operations require preparation. And preparation can be viewed as a collection of transactionseven everyday, innocuous ones such as buying an airplane ticket or signing up for flight school. It can also include somewhat less innocuous and more suspicious ones such as buying large amounts of fertilizer or a crop duster.

The problem, of course, is that the few suspicious transactions are embedded among many innocent ones. "It would be ideal if we could have an uncontrolled flow of information," says Poindexter, meaning ideal from an intelligence perspective. "But we realized you can't do that." So, it was understood within Project Genoa that technology would need to be developed to seek activity patterns that fit the intelligence community's idea of suspicious behavior.

Within a year of Project Genoa's founding, it was clear to Poindexter that TIA's most important work would be to help preempt asymmetric threats, what he calls the "new brand of terror," relying on the use of unconventional weapons and tactics against an overwhelmingly superior military force. The phrase total information awareness was presented publicly as early as 1999. Project Genoa, including the project that would become TIA, even experienced some technical success from 1997 through 2002, a period in which it received $42 million in funding.