The Watchers (33 page)

Cherry Vanilla World emerged when a separate red team covertly added terrorist sleeper agents into the mix.
Their
travel records were the signals that the templates were supposed to spot. Poindexter thought that the TIA analysis tools did a respectable job, and he hoped that Strawberry World and Chocolate World were not far off. But there was no denying that the system was primitive. It took a week to successfully identify some suspicious individuals in the fake world, and a lot of manual labor on the part of the researchers. Still, it was a start.

The TIA network also added real databases of known or suspected terrorists as well as the people, places, and activities that had been linked to them. These “entity databases” were highly classified and were restricted to agencies with nodes on the network. Critics of the intelligence failures that had preceded the 9/11 attacks lambasted the intelligence agencies for not sharing enough information about terrorism. But on the TIA network partners were swapping leads and finding ways to give one another access to their secrets. The network was quickly becoming the most active experiment of its kind. By the end of 2002 the number of individual users at agencies increased more than 35 times, from 7 to 250. By August 2003 the network had 23 nodes and 320 users.

By far, the NSA was the biggest presence on the network. The agency eventually installed 15 nodes, eclipsing all other organizations. The NSA seemed intensely interested in collaborating. But that struck Poindexter as rather odd, since the agency still had never participated in a single experiment.

 

The rules of membership on the TIA network were simple. Each agency brought its own problem set and could bring its own data. But participation in the experiments wasn't required. And there was also no rule against an agency taking any of the tools off the network to use within the walls of their own organization. Poindexter and Bob Popp both expected that the NSA was moonlighting, but neither could be sure.

Their suspicions were well founded. In fact, the NSA analysts did remove the experimental data crunching, linking, and extracting tools from the TIA network and quietly put them into service as part of the agency's warrantless surveillance regime. While Guantánamo interrogators and homeland defenders nibbled at the edges of the signal-in-the-noise dilemma, the NSA set off on a new course. And the agency's terror hunters put Poindexter's creation through an ordeal of size and strain that not even he could have devised.

Behind the blackout curtain that enveloped Fort Meade, the TIA tools were used on the massive flow of data that the NSA was now receiving from U.S. telecommunications companies—that stream of metadata that included phone numbers called, length of calls, the “To” and “From” lines of e-mails. There had never been a noisier ocean that demanded such immediate, careful attention.

The BAG was failing. The constant hair balls aggravated analysts, and technicians started to doubt whether or not graphs were really up to the challenge. Though its proponents within the agency—and there were many—saw graphing analysis as the new wave, others knew the awful truth. The NSA was churning out charts and diagrams, but it still hadn't created the early-warning system that Hayden had envisioned. It had still not achieved total information awareness.

When the time came to put Poindexter's tools to the test, the NSA was disappointed again. The TIA tools crashed. They were simply incapable of processing so much information in real time. Like balloons affixed to a fire hydrant, they burst.

Technologists liked to say that the TIA tools were “brittle,” that they weren't ready for prime time. And certainly that was true. But for present puposes, that didn't solve the NSA's problem. They'd have to tack a new course.

Yet, all was not lost from the TIA experiment. Poindexter had hit the nerve. What the NSA techies knew, what anyone who watched what he was up to in his workshop knew, was that Poindexter had just broken through a wall. He had dared to suggest, and then envision, that the government could tap into information at its source, that it could find signals in noise the moment they were created. Poindexter had articulated a data philosophy. He was H. G. Wells and Albert Einstein in one package. The imaginer and the creator. Fiction become reality.

In the months and years to come this glimpse of the future, of what was possible in spite of overwhelming odds, would become Poindexter's legacy. More than any tool, clever experiment, or acronym, his ambition became a beacon. It called to others, and it drove them.

 

It was time for a break. Summer was descending upon Washington, and Poindexter was looking forward to getting out of town. He wanted to talk up TIA to a wider audience. The Highlands Forum in Carmel Valley, California, seemed the perfect place.

There were few more exclusive tickets in the circuit of the Big Thinkers, the high priests of academia, government, and industry who relished an opportunity to marinate in one another's ideas. The Highlands Forum was created in 1994 when a Defense Department strategist named Dick O'Neill decided he couldn't do his job locked inside the Pentagon. O'Neill was puzzling over how war would break out in the information age. But roaming the fluorescent and concrete halls, he couldn't find a soul to talk to. Those who did approach him said something he already knew. O'Neill was uninspired.

And that was a problem, because O'Neill's job was to find unconventional answers to big, amorphous problems. He decided to get out of town. With the checkbook of the secretary of defense in hand, he called a dozen bright lights in government and academia, ditched his suit and his tie, and bought plane tickets for the Left Coast, as he and his Pentagon colleagues liked to call it.

They landed in Carmel Highlands, on the Monterey Peninsula, at O'Neill's brother-in-law's house. It was a glass-walled showcase perched atop a rocky tower overlooking Big Sur. There, over good wine and perhaps better cheese, the merry band of boondogglers thought their big thoughts and invented a tradition. Every year the Highlands Forum convened to recapture that magic. The bar was high. In that first meeting atop the precipitous cliffs of Carmel, with otters' tails lapping in the crashing waves below and the giant sun melting into the Pacific, the gatherers invented the concept of information warfare, which then defined how the military conceived of twenty-first-century conflict.

Eight years later leaders from industry, academia, government, and the arts convened on the rocky cliffs to imagine the future of fighting terrorism. Amid the backdrop of playful otters and solar splendor, and wine, Poindexter had come to talk about TIA. But for the presentation O'Neill had paired him up with an outsider, a thirty-eight-year-old computer software designer from Las Vegas named Jeff Jonas.

Jonas had been making the rounds in Washington recently. He'd designed a computer program that he thought might be useful to intelligence agencies trying to detect suspected terrorists. Jonas had hired some seasoned Washington trail guides to show him around town and make introductions. He'd managed to land an invitation to the forum, as good a sign as any that he was meeting the right people. Jonas was a techie like Poindexter, and so they made a logical pair for a panel.

But Poindexter had never heard of Jonas. And when he saw him in person, he could see why. This guy would never fit in among Poindexter's crowd.

Jonas showed up in black pants and a tight black T-shirt in a room full of khaki-clad wise men, sporting blazers and loafers. His clothes showed off a torso well trimmed by Iron Man triathlons and power bike rides. Jonas might have looked like the entertainment. Was he a dancer? A magician? When it came time for Jonas to speak, Poindexter thought he might be a comedian. Everything about Jonas—his dress, his casual manner of speaking, and his wild eyes—told Poindexter he was nutty.

But the more Poindexter listened, the more he heard a familiar refrain.

 

From an early age, Jonas was a dabbler, and directionless. Growing up in Healdsburg, California, north of San Francisco, in the late 1970s, Jonas had been exposed to all manner of techie innovators. His mother was a lawyer, and once she let him tag along to a demo of the TRS-80, one of the first desktop computers, which had just been released by the Tandy Corporation. His mother hoped it could help automate her legal billing process. But during the demo Jonas watched the computer connect to other machines used by academic researchers around the world. It instantly downloaded abstracts of papers in the researchers' files. Years later Jonas decided that the computer was probably communicating via the primordial Internet, developed by researchers at DARPA. But at that moment, standing there next to his mom and an inventor friend who had joined them, he thought this was magic.

Jonas was hooked.
I get this,
he thought. A singular obsession gripped him, and it ruined him for any other pursuit or profession. How could vast seas of information be harnessed and made useful?

At Jonas's high school computer lessons were reserved for upperclassmen, but he requested an exception. Soon the sophomore was learning how to use the new Personal Electronic Transactor, or PET, a personal computer released the previous year by Commodore.

Jonas's computing skills seemed preternatural. Over the summer he wrote a word-processing program for extra credit, which an instructor thought was so good that he sold it on Jonas's behalf to the Los Angeles Unified School District. The budding programmer was paid two hundred dollars. He had never considered that he could make money off a hobby.

After Jonas had taken the only two computer classes in the high school curriculum, he dropped out. He took his GED and enrolled in a local community college so he could take more courses. During his second semester the owner of a computer consulting firm gave a guest lecture, and he said he was looking to hire someone to write custom software. Jonas asked for the job.

He came on as a subcontractor, and before long had hired twenty-one employees to keep up with his workload. Jonas's business was growing faster than his boss's. He built customized software for local companies—a chain of shoe stores that needed an inventory tracking system, a newspaper that wanted to keep track of billing for its advertisers. It was all data management work. And it was always over budget. Even what appeared to be the simplest of projects, Jonas never finished.

He amassed $200,000 in debt. Creditors called. When the checks bounced, the employees left. He worked off half the debt but thought the balance looked insurmountable. It was Christmas 1984. Jonas filed for bankruptcy.

His father kicked him out of the house, so Jonas moved into his car. He kept the bankruptcy notice with him as he drove around, a kind of talisman on his road to reinvention. It named each of the creditors he vowed to one day pay back.

Jonas was twenty years old. He was broke. As he sat in the corner of an empty office, it hit him. He needed a plan. A blueprint, in fact. For designing computer systems.

This was where he'd gone wrong, he decided. He was trying to build complex structures without specifications. (The same was true for his life.) He vowed that from now on he'd only take on custom software work when he had a detailed plan, depicting every step needed to finish the job.

Jonas sought out software customers who'd been disappointed by over-budget and undelivered products—the kind that he used to build—and he made them a deal. He offered to build the software in a fixed period of time and according to a blueprint. They would pay him six hundred dollars a day. When he saw his potential customers' jaws drop and sensed he was being moved toward the door, Jonas finished explaining the offer. If he didn't do the job on time, he would pay the customer a hundred dollars a day for as long as it took him to finish.

The business took off. In time, Jonas was building software systems faster than his competition, and for companies whose businesses had nothing to do with one another. He made a financial management system for the Fresno airport, a labor management program for a local fruit grower, and a genealogy system for a North American association of llama owners. And then, while still in bankruptcy, he hooked up with another unlikely customer—a credit bureau and collections agency.

The credit bureau of Tulare County was looking for a way to improve its operations. Rather than sending out five collections notices to the same person, the company preferred to send one past-due notice listing all of the debtor's outstanding obligations.

But that wasn't so easy. The owner explained to Jonas that debtors evaded the collections agencies by making subtle alterations to their identities. They might change one letter in their name (Smith became Smithe) or invert two digits in their Social Security number. These people weren't untraceable, but they were more difficult to find. The credit bureau needed a way to match up the conflicting records, to predict that Smith was Smithe. Sure, Jonas said. He could do that. He called it “debtor matching.”

The credit bureau was very clear: Jonas's system must not accuse the wrong person of owing money. If it simply merged John Smith, Jr., and John Smith, Sr., assuming they were one and the same, he could be sure that the elder Smith would start making irate phone calls, demanding to know why he was being blamed for his son's debts. These erroneous matches, what data engineers liked to call “false positives,” would undermine the entire system and invite a slew of complaints or, worse, harassment claims.

Jonas perfected a technique for resolving people's true identities. His system could see past the smoke screen of aliases and forged numbers. The credit bureaus loved it, but they weren't the only industry troubled by masquerading clientele. After Jonas moved his company to Las Vegas, he discovered that casinos were having a problem keeping certain undesirables off the gaming floor.