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.

If anything, DARPA projects such as TIA are remarkably open to the publicespecially when compared with corporate initiatives, where competitive advantage is at stake. All of IAO's privacy work, done in tandem with the actual technology development, occurred more or less in plain sightprobably, according to Poindexter, in plainer sight than most other DARPA projects because of the IAO's decision to pursue the policy formulation track.

Yet despite the transparency, TIA was still savaged as the incarnation of some Orwell-ian nightmare. Was it? Poindexter certainly doesn't think so. But he sees that as almost beside the point. More troubling to him (and more illogical as well) is the fact that no one took advantage of the openness of the project. There was no debate. Instead, there was an invective-laced rush to judgment.

When he talks about what happened ("a discussion that was not totally open, and certainly wasn't reasoned"), Poindexter displays hardly a trace of emotion. Instead, he speaks of the public fracas over TIA with the dispassion of a judge, though also without disconnecting himself from an absolute faith in the virtues of TIA. "A lot of our critics feel that the way that you preclude some future policy that you don't particularly like is that you prevent the technology from being developed," he says. "And I think that's a very serious problem that we havethe idea that if you limit technology development, then that is the policy."MisconceptionsPoindexter seems more baffled by the media's treatment of TIA than he is by TIA's ultimate undoing. Poindexter believes that his effort to engage the privacy issue both in technology and in policy was a rare gesture. If anything, he says, DARPA got very few good ideas back from the R&D community on how to protect privacy. (The Palo Alto Research Center did have some excellent ideas for creating a "privacy appliance," he says, for which PARC received a contract.)

In addition to the media's painting the project with broad, Orwellian strokes, Poindexter says some reporting was just dead wrong. He never intended to build a single, central database to collect data on every transaction by every American. Architecturally, he thinks it's a poor idea. Ditto on the idea for warehousing all this transaction data.

He also took umbrage at the notion that he was going to manage some TIA-based "product." He cited a privacy advocate who leaked news about TIA to John Markoff of The New York Times. Poindexter wouldn't name this person. But he says that either "through ignorance or through mischievousness," the advocate suggested that DARPA was going to implement the technology it was developing.