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John Poindexter Knows When You are Sleeping, He Knows…

By Bill Berkowitz

"Every step you take, every move you make, I'll be watching you."
--The Police

The seal of the new department of Total Information Awareness

By now, if you're living, breathing and sentient to the latest developments in President Bush's war against privacy…er…terrorism, you've certainly heard of Total Information Awareness. TIA received the lion's share of the attention during the run-up and narrow debate prior to the passage of legislation creating the newly formed Homeland Security Department. TIA will allow the feds to monitor the e-mail, Internet use, travel, credit-card purchases, telephone and bank records, driver's licenses of foreigners and US citizens and much more. In short, it's data-mining gone postal.

There are a number of opponents to this draconian proposal, but that opposition didn't galvanize quickly enough to prevent TIA from being included in the legislation recently signed by President Bush.

Before its passage, William Safire, the dean of conservative columnists, penned a column calling the proposal (now law) "a supersnoop's dream" in his New York Times column. Safire wrote:

"To this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial sources, add every piece of information that government has about you - passport application, driver's license and bridge toll records, judicial and divorce records, complaints from nosy neighbors to the FBI, your lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camera surveillance - and you have the supersnoop's dream: a 'Total Information Awareness' about every U.S. citizen.

The bill, the Washington Times' Audrey Hudson reported shortly before its passage, "establishes the Total Information Awareness program within a new agency - the Security Advanced Research Projects Agency (SARPA), which would be modeled on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the central research office for the Defense Department which pursues research and technology, and led to the creation of the Internet."

The Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency (HSARPA), modeled after the DARPA, hands it at least $500 million a year to fund the development of new technologies. According to the bill, HSARPA will "promote revolutionary changes in technologies that would promote homeland security, advance the development (of technologies), and accelerate the prototyping and deployment of technologies that would address homeland vulnerabilities."

"What that means is anyone's guess," writes ZDNet's Declan McCullagh, "but one dark possibility is that this effort will link up with the Defense Department's Information Awareness Office, run by former national security adviser John Poindexter, which is reportedly creating large-scale data warehouses to analyze everyday activities like credit card purchases and travel reservations."

Total Information Awareness comes to us courtesy of retired admiral John Poindexter. Why Poindexter? How did he get back on the government's payroll? The fact of the matter is that in recent years, Poindexter has worked as a DARPA contractor at Syntek Technologies. Inc., an Arlington, Virginia-based consulting firm "that helped develop technology to search through large amounts of data," the Washington Post's Robert O'Harrow Jr. reported in early November.

At a Pentagon press briefing on November 20, Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, Edward C. "Pete" Aldridge, explained that Poindexter "has a passion for this project. He's a Ph.D. in physics. He has an enthusiasm for the project. He came to us with the project after September the 11th and volunteered it to DARPA. That was briefed -- Tony Tether, the director of DARPA, came over with John and briefed it to me, and I thought it was a project worthy of the pursuit of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency. And you want an enthusiastic leader. Once the tool is developed and - John will not be involved. But it's his enthusiasm and his volunteering of this idea which is why we developed and started to fund it."

John Poindexter will lead the domestic spy agency

Poindexter, the former National Security Advisor to President Reagan, has operated government programs before. He is the gentleman who played a key role in the Iran-Contra affair, the mid-1980s scandal involving the secret sale of arms to Iran and the diversion of its profits to help covertly fund and support the contra forces in Nicaragua. In 1990, the Admiral was convicted in of five felonies - a conviction that was later overturned on appeal - which included destroying official documents and obstructing congressional inquiries into the affair. Sounds like the perfect resume for a super-snoop.

According to the Electronic Privacy Information Center - http://www.epic.org:

"As National Security Adviser, Admiral Poindexter was involved with a controversial Reagan administration initiative in 1984 known as National Security Decision Directive, NSDD 145. NSDD-145 gave the National Security Agency (NSA) control over security for all government computer systems containing 'sensitive but unclassified' information. This was followed by a second directive issued by Poindexter that extended military authority over all computer and communications security for the federal government and private industry. The Computer Security Act, passed by Congress in 1987, reestablished authority for computer security policy at the National Institute for Standards & Technology."

More recently, Poindexter resurfaced within the administration as the head of the Information Awareness Office - whose motto is "knowledge is power." The IAO was described by the American Prospect in March as "a new little bureaucracy recently created by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, [and]… charged with focusing on new kinds of military threats, including terrorism."

Poindexter's Information Awareness Office has "several substantial contracts in the works with technology vendors," writes the Washington Post's O'Harrow. Contractors include Hicks & Associates Inc., a national security consultant in McLean; Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., a Falls Church, Virginia.-based management and technology consulting firm, and Ratheon Corp., a technology company that will provide search and data-mining tools. "Poindexter made the argument to the right players, so they asked him back into the government," said Mike McConnell, a vice president at Booz Allen and former director of the NSA.

On November 7, according to the US Department of Defense website, Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. was awarded a $1,500,000 increment as part of a $62,876,051 "cost-plus-fixed-fee contract for total information awareness support."

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