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List:       cypherpunks
Subject:    Poindexter Confidential
From:       "R. A. Hettinga" <rah () shipwright ! com>
Date:       2004-04-29 16:37:03
Message-ID: p061005f3bcb6df6afa22 () [66 ! 149 ! 49 ! 5]
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<http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.05/poindexter.html>

Wired 12.05: May 2004





Poindexter Confidential 

The Caltech physics wonk infamous for Iran-Contra, Total Information
Awareness, and terrorism futures talks about life as a not-so-private
citizen.

By Spencer Reiss  Page 1 of 1
John Poindexter's career has played out in the headlines: Iran-Contra
conspirator, the Pentagon's Big Brother in chief, godfather of a futures
market to predict terrorism. But there's an alternate reality: The
67-year-old retired admiral is the only serious technologist ever to reach
the highest circles of power in Washington. He's a Caltech PhD who two
decades ago dragged the White House into the digital age, plugging in
everything from fiber-optic video to email. He uses Groove Networks'
Workspace to keep in touch with friends and rhapsodizes about encryption
like a cypherpunk. In the first interview since Congress forced him to step
down last summer as head of Darpa's Information Awareness Office,
Poindexter speaks out about privacy, sim terrorists, and Iraqi WMD.


WIRED: What was it like being grilled by Richard Feynman for your PhD?
POINDEXTER: I was scared out of my wits.

What was the topic?
Electronic shielding by closed shells in thulium compounds. I'm afraid it
doesn't really translate into English.

Good practice for some of the political buzz saws you've run into since?
It's easy to be a critic. We live in an information society. Corporations
and governments have mountains of data that power our economy and give us
the highest standard of living in the world. The question is, How do we
manage information intelligently to preserve our freedoms, protect our way
of life, and advance civilization?

"Knowledge is power" was the IAO's official motto - that spooks a lot of
people.
Knowledge is power, for good or evil. The issue is giving goodness the
edge. We can't eliminate evil; we can recognize it and try to deter it by
ensuring that those doing evil are detected and punished. This applies to
the terrorist and to those who would abuse data.

The program's goal was to "revolutionize" the US government's ability to
identify terrorists.
You can't take an existing system and dramatically change its capabilities
overnight. You start by creating a small, experimental network, running it
in parallel with the "normal" system, and then introducing new ideas and
capabilities. We had real users from the intelligence community working
with a combination of real and synthetic data.

Synthetic data?
It's a little like the Sims - you create a virtual world that has real
addresses, real airports, but is populated with imaginary people. We built
them by taking a list of all the last names in the country and then adding
first names at random. Then we had them take trips. We had a team of a
dozen people who came up with scenarios. You introduce terrorists into your
world, and then you start looking for ways to pick them out from the data.

And you succeeded?
In a very preliminary way, with a lot of human help, yes, we did.

Your critics never relented on privacy questions.
Advocacy groups want to stay in business, so it's in their interest to
paint a dire picture.

Is privacy a right?
It's certainly not a constitutional right. It's an individual right that
has to be balanced with concern for the common good. Privacy has to be
relative to other objectives - for instance, security. The greatest threat
to privacy is terrorism. How much privacy was there in Afghanistan under
the Taliban?

Are we managing that balance well today?
Not at all - in a lot of ways we have the worst of both worlds: no security
and no privacy. There are at least 50 federal laws and regulations
regarding the handling of personal information. Programmers call that
spaghetti code.

You were accused of building giant data banks of private information.
Nothing I worked on had to do with collecting data - we have plenty of that
in this country, probably more than we need. Our focus was turning it into
useful information. You leave it where it is - because of the cost of
moving it to a central location, the difficulty of keeping up with
technology, and the US citizen's basic distrust of the government.

So how do you persuade people that having the government peer into their
lives is a good idea?
Most people don't understand what we were trying to do. Too many opinions
are formed based on sound bites from those who yell the loudest. One of the
things we were working on was a "privacy appliance" that would conceal a
person's identity until a case could be made against them. Congress killed
that, too.

The technologies you used include Groove Networks' very trendy
collaborative software
You don't collaborate because it's faddish - you do it because there's
always ambiguity in the data and you need diverse viewpoints to try to
decide what it all really means.

For instance, Iraqi WMD?
That's a perfect example. There were obviously different perspectives, but
did they find their way to the decisionmaker? And in such a way that he
could understand what the different interpretations were and how they were
arrived at? I don't think that happened.

So, a Groove space for the president?
At some point, a US president will be in a Groove space or something
comparable, sure. Maybe not this next time, but four or eight years from
now we'll elect someone who grew up on the Internet and is more willing to
sit at a keyboard and do things on his own.

Al Gore!
God, I hope not.


-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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