The Watchers (30 page)

The artist took Popp's conservative approach to the other extreme, returning some sketches that used nothing but the office's initials: IAO. This was harder than it needed to be, Popp thought. As he sat at his desk struggling to make the image work, his secretary came and asked if he wanted lunch from the deli. Perfect timing. Popp handed her some cash and returned to the sketches.

A few minutes later the secretary returned with Popp's lunch and put his change on the desk. As he reached for the loose bills, he stopped short. A one-dollar bill had landed a few inches from one of the drawings. Popp stared at the great seal on the back of the note, a pyramid topped by a shining, all-seeing eye.

“Hey!” he yelled out to his secretary. “Look at that!”

“The eye. Like the letter
I
,” he said. And the pyramid, an A shape. IA. What could he think of that looked like an O? He thought about it for a few seconds, and then it came to him. “A globe!”

IAO. Information Awareness Office. Popp would take the eye and pyramid of the great seal but have it cast a gaze across a picture of the world. Information awareness. Total information awareness, in fact. It was perfect.

He took five minutes to sketch out a rough version. Then he showed the mock-up to his secretary. “Oh, very clever!” she said. He asked a few colleagues around the office, which by now had grown in size and moved into more substantial quarters. People seemed to like it. Popp had the sketch artist do a more polished job before showing it to Poindexter.

He had the same reaction. What a neat idea. Poindexter had long thought of the perfect information system as a pyramid, with a decision maker at the top able to reach down to the base of the structure for the information he needed. The logo conveyed just the right idea, he and Popp agreed. And it was provocative. It would get the public's attention, Popp thought. For him, “the public” was the agencies and scientists with which DARPA did business. It was not the man on the street. He never imagined that the
general
public would see the logo, and so he never dreamed anyone would react unfavorably.

Popp and Poindexter noted that the great seal on the dollar bill incorporated some Latin phrases:
Novus ordo seclorum,
“New Order of the Ages,” and
Annuit coeptis,
or “He approves of our undertaking.” Could they work some Latin into the IAO seal? they wondered.

Poindexter had a favorite Latin phrase, and it seemed a perfect choice:
Scientia est potentia
. “Knowledge is power.” He placed it underneath the all-seeing eye, which in the final version of the logo cast an enormous searching beam of light over an image of the globe.

The people who knew DARPA, they told each other, were going to love this. The logo was published on the office's Web site in April.

 

The Information Awareness Office came together in the span of a few months—a breakneck pace for the government, even at crisis tempo. Poindexter added more staff. The TIA network attracted new members every month. By year's end Poindexter would award tens of millions of dollars in research contracts to more than two dozen companies. Some were big, well-known Washington players, others were smaller shops located far outside the Beltway.

At the beginning of his research experiments Poindexter drew a bright line in the kinds of data he would use. On the TIA Network, which was classified and restricted to intelligence and military agencies, he would tap into real intelligence, collected through foreign operations. This was the daily take of the intelligence community, and as far as Poindexter knew, it was all obtained legally.

But he needed a source of domestic intelligence as well. Something akin to the mounds of corporate and personal information that TIA was meant to mine. Unable to obtain these kinds of databases legally, Poindexter decided to build them. His team constructed a repository of simulated intelligence reports about terrorists, including fake accounts of their daily activities that left transactional footprints. The red team would use these synthetic worlds to run their exercises. In these virtual realities hundreds of thousands of innocent and ordinary electronic people would mix among a few bad actors. It was here that Poindexter would truly discover whether TIA could detect terrorist patterns. Whether it could distinguish signals from noise.

Two paths of research—one foreign, one domestic. Poindexter had no idea that at the NSA, an agency he wanted with him on his quest, the line between those two worlds had practically disappeared.

 

 

 

 

They called it the BAG. As in black bag. Grab bag. Bag of tricks. And while it was all those things, the acronym that the National Security Agency's techs used for their terrorist hunting machine stood for something unexpected: Big Ass Graph.

In the late 1990s the engineers and systems gurus at the NSA became enamored of computerized graphs to display huge sets of information. Graphs were simple, and elegant. A set of axes and plotted points. Inasmuch as data was a collection of points—events, people, places—they too could be displayed on a graph in a comprehensible or meaningful form.

That was the idea, at least. Not unlike the data harvesters of Able Danger, who displayed names and events on link charts, or those of Poindexter's Genoa team, who sought to diagram information as a series of questions and answers, the graph builders of the NSA wanted to turn raw data into visual knowledge. Graphs became their favored method.

The BAG, as its name implied, was big. Enormous. It compressed mounds of data into their linear essence. The BAG could show how swarms of people were connected to different places by displaying each set of data on its own axis. The graph could turn a seemingly random pile of information into a more complete explanation of relationships. Put enough names, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses into a graph, and it might illustrate an entire social network, which in the global terrorist hunt was indispensable intelligence. (The way to roll up a cell was to pick off the members.)

The BAG was the ultimate manifestation of graph theory. And its ultimate aim was to reveal suspicious linkages. Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, with the NSA frantically searching for the next sleeper cell poised to attack, the BAG became one of its favorite tools. But it was not entirely the agency's invention.

The BAG was created by a computer scientist who perfected his craft far away from the gates of Fort Meade. Dr. J. C. Smart started his technical career at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, about a half hour's drive east of San Francisco Bay. Smart joined the lab in 1980, after graduating from Northwestern University with a degree in electrical engineering and a specialization in computer science and logic.

Few institutions in the world could offer a bright, enterprising computer geek such a rich history of technological innovation, and a bounding professional playpen, as Lawrence Livermore. The lab played a central role in the evolution of computing in America. A year after its founding, in 1952, it purchased the UNIVAC, the country's first commercial computer. Year after year it bought the prototypes of the most powerful computers in the world and helped turn a generation of experimental machines into viable, marketable systems that changed the face of science, communications, and business in America.

Livermore, founded at the height of the cold war, had developed nuclear warheads and made early breakthroughs in fusion energy. The line between computer research and warfare was a thin one. In fact, each fed the other. As the nuclear arms race speeded up, the government's requirement for ever more sophisticated and powerful simulators to help design nuclear weapons fueled the private sector's construction of new supercomputers. At Livermore, Smart sat at the crossroads of American technology and national security.

Smart worked at the lab for nineteen years. He completed his graduate and PhD work in computer science at the University of California at Davis. In his studies and at work, Smart became an authority on graph theory and its application to national security problems. In 1996, he founded a new center at Livermore dedicated to “information operations, warfare, and assurance.” IOWA, as it was called, put Smart at yet another crossroads—the converging worlds of computer security, espionage, and digital war. Those were the NSA's sweet spots, and so it was perhaps inevitable that Smart would make the trip east and end up at the agency's doorstep. He brought the BAG with him.

In 1999, Smart became the technical director of the agency's signals intelligence program. Four years later, amid the heat of the terror war, he took the same job in the agency's National Security Operations Center. This was the heart of the agency's early-warning system, a fitting place for a scientist whose creation was put into service for that purpose.

The center was manned around the clock, and its sole purpose was to alert the president and the national leadership to an unfolding crisis. Blue lights flashed whenever the agency picked up emergency signals traffic from its worldwide stations, sometimes within minutes of the event. In 2000, the center was the first unit of the intelligence community to alert the White House that USS
Cole
had been bombed. By the time Smart arrived it was a beehive of intelligence activity, central and vital to the war.

As was the BAG. The terrorist hunters poured signals into it, in the hopes of finding those hidden connections that would bring down a terrorist network. But if the BAG was a useful tool, it was also a demanding one. For the BAG to tell them things, the hunters had to fill it. Constantly. There was only one source that might satisfy its appetite.

 

The nation's phone companies and Internet service providers owned a rich set of details about the people who used their networks. In order to hone their marketing campaigns, companies studied whom their customers called and how long they spoke, and then developed service packages to attract new business. They also used this data to create monthly phone bills. The companies would watch for communications surges at a particular time of day in order to manage the traffic on their networks. All of this data constituted a valuable repository of corporate knowledge. It was also a potential gold mine of terrorism intelligence, and after the 9/11 attacks, the NSA asked the companies to share it.

This wasn't wiretapping as usual. The agency didn't just want to target individual people's communications. They wanted blanket access to the information about the network as a whole. It was an extraordinary request, but it wasn't the first time the spy agency had made it. Indeed, Mike Hayden himself had proposed the idea on February 27, 2001, nine months before the terrorist attacks.

On that day James Payne, the head of Qwest Communications' federal government business unit, accompanied the company's chief executive to au business meeting with Hayden at his Fort Meade headquarters. The CEO, Joe Nacchio, wanted a piece of a new NSA contract called Groundbreaker, a multibillion-dollar program to outsource maintenance of the agency's nonclassified technology systems, such as desktop computers. Several Washington mainstays were vying for a piece of the deal, forming large teams of companies. Payne had made plenty of drop-in calls like this before to discuss potential business with large, important clients. Indeed, he was an old hand in the close-knit club of federal telecom contractors and agency executives.

A lifelong Washingtonian, Payne had mastered the ins and outs of the government market. He knew how to build relationships not just with agency chiefs but with the program managers and contracting officials underneath them who had the final say on how dollars were spent. They were the seldom seen bureaucrats who ultimately decided which companies rose and fell.

Payne's impeccable dress, polished demeanor, and practically antebellum gentility seemed outwardly at odds with the bureaucrats and bean counters of the federal contracting market. But his refined style masked the heart of a bare-knuckled businessman. Payne had grown up in the government telecom space, a viper pit in its own right where executives hopped among companies and found themselves fighting alongside a friend one day and bidding against him the next. They understood the bottom line—the federal government was, by far, the largest single buyer of telecom services in the United States. Payne fought for the business he won; the NSA was no exception.

Qwest already had an in with the NSA, having worked on agency projects for a few years. The company had allocated portions of its telecom network for the agency's exclusive use. Payne and Nacchio wanted to expand the business relationship. And so did Hayden.

In the meeting Hayden told Payne and Nacchio that he wanted information about Qwest's customers, as well as the flow of traffic across its network, in order to track computer hackers and foreign intelligence services trying to penetrate U.S. government systems, particularly within the Defense Department. The agency was going after digital spies, not terrorists. Part of the NSA's charter included the defense of government secrets. And by 2001, outside forces were trying to capture them with alarming frequency and some success. Government officials had also begun to fear a “digital Pearl Harbor” if intruders were to seize control of sensitive military systems or other key U.S. infrastructures, like power grids or the financial system, via the Internet. Hayden couldn't let that happen.

The agency didn't need to target individuals to look for anomalous behavior. It could monitor—or rather, have Qwest monitor—an entire network for suspicious patterns of activity. Maybe it was a particular Internet address probing a government network or a series of bogus information requests pinged off a server indicating the preparation for some massive electronic attack. Faceless signals, but signals nonetheless.