What has John Poindexter been up to lately?

Amid public outcry, in 2003, Congress defunded the Bush Administration's Total Information Awareness (TIA) project, a massive Orwellian technology-driven surveillance and data mining initiative. Now, it is attempting to pass through the FISA Amendments Act of 2007 (S. 2248), a bill that would affectively give legal standing and retroactive legal immunity to a major component of this project.

S. 2248 is now before the Senate Judiciary, and will be voted on in just a few days. Unless public opposition is once again vigilant and strong, this new TIA bill has a good chance of passing in committee and of reaching the full Senate floor. Unfortunately, the dire consequences of this legislation for the survival of democracy in America, including the potential to destroy fair elections, have been greatly muted, misrepresented, and downplayed by the mainstream media; and mounting pressure on Congress from both the Bush Administration and the giant telecommunication corporations have combined to increase the odds that S. 2248 will soon become law.

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With this cooperation from the telecoms, the Bush Administration now appears to have realized a major component of its TIA project, a publicly denounced program that was presumed to have been abandoned by the Bush Administration. The purpose of this project was to "imagine, develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate and transition information technologies, components and prototype, closed-loop, information systems that will counter asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness." In its present form, the integrated surveillance network has the capacity to maintain fully searchable copies of the contents of all electronic communications of American citizens.

Since there is virtually no judicial oversight, the Bush Administration now has a blank check to define its search criteria any way it wishes, not only to look for terrorists but also for anyone else it may deem a threat -- including investigative reporters and political opponents. The implications of a government in possession of such an awesome power are profound and far-reaching. These dire consequences include the potential for systematic and widespread disruption of fair elections in the United States. In these months prior to a national election, the Bush Administration now has the capacity to read private correspondence between its Democratic opponents and thereby to gain unfair political advantage. It has the capacity to blackmail congressional and other government agents into lockstep conformity with its mandates. It accordingly has the power to eviscerate not only Fourth Amendment rights against unlawful search and seizure, but also to invade and chill off First Amendment rights of freedom of speech and the press. In short, it has the power to shut down democracy in America. It is therefore not surprising that the Bush Administration now seeks to immunize the telecom companies from civil suits and judicial scrutiny since the unfettered operation of these companies is a vital component of its TIA network.

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In January of this year, (Poindexter) was elected to the board of BrightPlanet, a firm that boasts "the most powerful search, harvest and document federation technology available in the world." The company's press release announcing Poindexter's appointment noted the former national security adviser would "provide guidance in developing further contacts within the intelligence community."

Nearly four years after Congress pulled the plug on what critics assailed as an Orwellian scheme to spy on private citizens, Singapore is set to launch an even more ambitious incarnation of the Pentagon's controversial Total Information Awareness program -- an effort to collect and mine data across all government agencies in the hopes of pinpointing threats to national security.

The Singapore prototype of the system -- dubbed Risk Assessment and Horizon Scanning, or RAHS -- was rolled out early this week at a conference in the Southeast Asia city-state. Retired U.S. Adm. John Poindexter, the architect of the original Pentagon program, traveled to Singapore to deliver a speech at the unveiling, while backers have already begun quietly touting the system to U.S. intelligence officials.

In 2003, plans for Total Information Awareness, or TIA, sparked outrage among privacy advocates. TIA was one of several programs run out of the Information Awareness Office at Darpa, the Pentagon's advanced research projects agency. Fueling public indignation was news that Poindexter, President Reagan's national security adviser and a key figure in the '80s Iran-Contra scandal, was in charge of the office.

Facing an avalanche of bad publicity, Poindexter resigned in August 2003. Congress pulled funding for the program, and TIA and related programs were either terminated or moved to other agencies. The Information Awareness Office was closed.

But Poindexter's vision never lost currency among advocates of data mining, particularly in Singapore, a country that mixes elements of democratic governance with authoritarian rule.

While different in design from TIA, the RAHS system shares some intellectual roots with the doomed Darpa effort. The two principal consultants for RAHS are John Peterson, of the Virginia-based Arlington Institute, and Dave Snowden, who was previously supported by Poindexter's office within Darpa, and is now the chief scientific officer of Cognitive Edge, a Singapore-based company.

Whether terrorism or epidemics, Singapore's rapid acceptance of data mining is a breath of fresh air to the system's designers. "Singapore is small and has this intrinsic sense of paranoia," (John) Peterson said.
"I think we would have been stuck in Darpa doing experimental research for another 15 years without anyone making it operational," Snowden said. "Singapore just walked around and saw what they liked, and said, 'The hell with it, let's just make it operational,' which is much more pragmatic and forward-thinking."

While the controversial Darpa efforts were never more than research, RAHS is set to launch with five different agencies in September. Eventually, RAHS would extend across Singapore's entire government, a plan that makes it the most ambitious data-snooping effort in the world.
Those involved in the Singapore system are well aware of the brouhaha over TIA, but say they are less concerned about RAHS. Snowden pointed out that although RAHS would pore through everything from health records to raw intelligence, only the "metadata" is shared among agencies, and not the data itself.

SINGAPORE: Health Minister Khaw Boon Wan has announced that all cancer patients will soon be listed on a National Registry of Diseases.

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Researchers and policy-makers will have access to the data, but Mr Khaw stressed that it will not be made available to insurance companies and employers.
The new legislation will also provide clear guidelines on patient confidentiality. This was the main issue raised during the debate in Parliament.
One key concern is the release of information that identifies patients for national health programmes.

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Mr Khaw said: "Let me assure the House that the data the registry collects will be treated with the strictest of confidence. Firstly, any unauthorised use of identifiable data will be a criminal offence. Secondly, we will only collect data which is absolutely essential for healthcare policy making."
Patients with heart disease, stroke and kidney failure are currently listed on voluntary registries.

Mr Khaw said these illnesses may also come under the new laws, which would make it mandatory for healthcare professionals to report the diseases.

Peterson, a futurist, describes RAHS as a system that monitors multiple feeds of data -- both open and classified -- to detect possible threats. "Essentially it's a strategic tool that ties together every one of the agencies in a government into a large network that is constantly scanning the horizon looking for weak signals that point toward the possibility of a significant event that would have important implications for Singapore," he said.

Snowden's work at Cognitive Edge concentrates on automated software to detect such "weak signals" that would normally be passed over by human analysts. "Instead of having analysts trawl through huge amounts of data to decide what it means, the data is tagged very quickly, then they decide what the patterns in the metadata mean," said Snowden.

Steven Aftergood, head of the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy, said that while he wasn't familiar with RAHS, privacy issues are important in any data-mining system. "Some government officials attempt to finesse the privacy issue by insisting that individual records and data will not normally be shared or subject to examination by a human observer so, they argue, there is no real infringement on privacy," he wrote in an e-mail. "But that doesn't get to the heart of the issue. Personal privacy is compromised whenever one is subject to unwanted surveillance, even by a machine."

John Poindexter, “Technology Panel Introduction”. John was Director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)’s Information Awareness Office which had been tasked to develop the Total (Terrorism) Information Awareness programme.

John Peterson (Arlington Institute), “RAHS— An Important Idea Whose Time Has Come”. John is best known for his work in the area of high impact surprises— “wild cards”— as well as the area of surprise anticipation. He is one of two principle consultants to the RAHS project.

Dave Snowden (Cognitive Edge), “How RAHS Can Make Networked Government a Reality”. Dave is known for his Cynefin framework, one of the first practical applications of complexity theory to management science. He is the other principle consultant to the RAHS project.

Gary Ackerman

(Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies), “Mapping the Threatscape”. Gary is Director of the U.S. Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies as well as the Director of the WMD Terrorism Research Programme at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. His work focuses on the various aspects of terrorism, including modeling and simulation of terrorist behavior as well as threat assessment.

Gary Klein (Klein Associates), “Naturalistic Decision-making”. Gary is noted for his work in the field of naturalistic decision making, particularly in demanding situations that are marked by time pressure and organizational constraints.

Of course Snowden concedes that how the public views the privacy issue depends on "how people explain it and how it's sold."

That's where the conference in Singapore comes in. The goal of the symposium, which took place Monday and Tuesday, was "to expose this thing to the international world," said the Arlington Institute's Peterson. Officials from the United Kingdom, Australia, the United States, New Zealand and Israel were invited to attend.

The (RAHS) conference follows a visit to Washington, D.C., the first week in March by a Singapore delegation to discuss RAHS with U.S. intelligence and Homeland Security officials. The Singaporeans had on their agenda meetings with Charles Allen, DHS' assistant secretary for intelligence and analysis, and Patrick Neary, strategy chief for National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell, according to the PR firm hired by the Singapore government to publicize the trip, though the planned meeting with Neary didn't take place. Neither DHS nor the Office of the Director of National Intelligence would comment on their interest in the program.


Poindexter, who was also on the roster of people the Singaporeans were scheduled to meet with in the United States, never quite disappeared from the data-mining scene.

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As for Poindexter's association with RAHS and his appearance at this week's conference, Nathan noted that meetings with the former Darpa manager are consultative. "We have no formal relationship with John Poindexter but have met him to exchange ideas and perspectives," he said.

Whether formal or informal, everyone involved in RAHS is aware that Poindexter has proved a lightning rod for critics of data mining. Recalling the events that led to the closing of Poindexter's office, Snowden, who describes himself as "on the left politically," was candid about the man he still calls a friend.

"He's a genius," Snowden said, "but he's a naive genius; he didn't realize how it was going to be picked up."