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.

Then 9/11 happened. Some Project Genoa managers felt that the technology they were working on could have prevented the tragedy. Poindexter is more circumspect. "Now, I don't think I would say that officially. But certainly I felt a great frustration that we had not been able to avoid 9/11," he says. After the attack, he suggested that DARPA establish a Total Information Awareness office and invest a significantly greater amount of money in the effort.Overcoming ControversyThus, Poindexter joined DARPA to head the Information Awareness Office in January 2002. He was mindful of his own controversial profile and concerned that it might be a problem for him and for TIAespecially in the eyes of Congress. "But we thought I could stay long enough to get the R&D programs started, and we achieved that," he says. "I didn't particularly want to come back into government and run it. However, in the end, it seemed like the only way we could get it off the ground.... And I truly felt that the country had a serious problem. I had ideas about how [it] could be solved, and felt that I could make a contribution. But I had never planned to stay very long."

Anticipating controversy, Poindexter says he felt that it was important to move quickly. So he suggested something radical for DARPA: Develop the technology and the policy to govern its use in parallel rather than serially. He understood that policy-based objections to TIA's underlying technology might retard the technology's development. But if the policy were to evolve concurrently, and to forthrightly address anticipated objections, then the project stood a chance of surviving to fruition.

Poindexter saw privacy as the mother of all objections. "We were not blindsided by the reaction to TIA," he says. "I knew from the beginning that privacy was going to be a huge issue, especially with regard to applying Total Information Awareness in counterterrorism. Because if the technology development was successful, a logical place to apply it was inside the United States."

So, he says, part of the early policy development was to initiate a "reasoned, open public discussion of the privacy issues." The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) initially expressed interest in studying the problem, Poindexter says, but backed out, anticipating a maelstrom (correctly, as it turned out). "I took the money I would have used for NAS and enlisted the aid of some Washington think tanks to begin seminars and conferences about the issue of what kind of policy framework would make sense to put around a set of technologies like TIA."