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.

"TIA was being used by real users, working on real dataforeign data. Data where privacy is not an issue. And those users were working on real problems. And the experiment's metrics were being measured so we could figure out whether the technology was really helping or not. We also got feedback from users on what needed to be modified."

In other words, at this point it was a typical big IT project. But Poindexter believes it was better designed than most because it focused on iterative development. "That's the way you develop these big systems. You do it on a small scale. And you accept failure as a possible outcome of some of the experiments. If you don't get failures, you're not pushing hard enough on the objectives."

Poindexter likes to talk about the "bathtub curve." The three phases of intelligence are research, analysis and production. If you chart the amount of time spent on each, you see a curve that looks like a bathtub, with most resources going to research and production and the least going to the most important part: analysis. One of TIA's objectives was to invert the curve, take time out of research and reporting and put it into analysissince "humans are still the best thinking machines for analysis." It worked, says Poindexter; TIA appeared to upend the bathtub curve.Assassination FuturesBut this momentum collided with yet another controversy that erupted last summer (a TIA project called "FutureMAP") that would ultimately be the undoing of the Information Awareness Office, TIA and Poindexter.

FutureMAP (or future markets applied to prediction) was an experiment to see whether a futures exchangewherein terrorism experts could bet on potential future national security eventsmight have value in predicting the likelihood of such events. Economists have lately become enamored of futures exchanges. The idea is that if you give people an economic incentive to make accurate predictions, they will produce better-formed judgments on future events to make a profit. Such exchanges are being widely tested and have proven to be at least partly effective in other domains, such as predicting future telecom policy.

One of the contractors working on FutureMAP posted on its website such potential futures as the assassination of Yasser Arafat, the overthrow of the King of Jordan and a missile attack by North Korea. When these postings came to light, critics argued that they amounted to an online casino where people could profit from betting on death and disaster. A vituperative political feeding frenzy ensued.