The Watchers (34 page)

 

Under state gaming regulations casinos were required to bar anyone who appeared on an official “exclusionary list,” a kind of all-points bulletin of people often known to use fake identities. These listed people ran the gamut, from scamsters to money launderers. The casinos also had their own no-entry lists, which included gamblers who stole chips from other players on the floor and gambling addicts who had explicitly asked the casino management not to let them play. While crooks and junkies were bad for business, the casinos had a second problem: casino employees who started working against the house. That kind of behavior was potentially costly and hard to detect. The management needed a way to cover themselves, finding threats from the outside and within their own organization.

In 1994, Jonas built a new software program that discovered watch-listed gamblers as well as latent connections among casino workers and gamblers. He called it Non-Obvious Relationship Awareness, or NORA. He sold the program to the Mirage, whose corporate security department fed it watch-listed parties as well as information about their employees and their customers.

Players often didn't realize how the data they voluntarily handed over to the casino was being analyzed. Whenever they registered with the hotel, signed up for a frequent player card, and especially when they asked for credit, they left a trail. It included names, Social Security numbers, phone numbers, dates of birth, addresses. NORA went to work, ensuring the watch-listed parties weren't the same as the trusted people—employees and customers.

The tool succeeded because it placed bad guys, like card cheats, in the exact same database as those trusted individuals. This was a kind of shortcut, and Jonas realized that it actually made the tool smarter. NORA found many interesting connections that the casinos had missed. Once NORA discovered that a pay clerk's personnel record matched up with information about a vendor working for the casino. This meant one of two things. Either the clerk was being repaid for work performed for the casino or the employee was stealing, by setting up a dummy account for a company that didn't exist. NORA couldn't say which story was true, but it compelled the management to find out.

Jonas had found his direction. Years passed. He made money. He ran in marathons. He was a single dad to three kids. His life was normal. He hadn't planned to start working for spies.

 

Around 8:30 on the morning of September 11, 2001, Jonas was in a cab headed to a meeting in uptown Manhattan. His hotel was next door to the Twin Towers. “Is there time to stop so I can go up to the observation deck?” he asked the cabbie. Jonas had seen the view from the top only once.

“Not if you want to make your meeting,” the driver said. They drove north. In hindsight Jonas recalled seeing people standing gob-smacked in the streets looking back behind him. He never turned around to see what had caught their attention. Over the din of the city and his own preoccupations, he hadn't heard the explosions behind him.

 

Jonas rented a car and headed for home. During the drive he recalled how only a few days before the attacks he'd paid a visit in New York to the top security official for one of the stock exchanges. He had a picture of Osama bin Laden hanging behind his desk. When Jonas asked why, he replied, “This is what I'm most afraid of.”

A day into the car ride home, Jonas got another idea.

Maybe I can help,
he thought.

 

 

 

Poindexter listened to Jonas's entertaining stories about catching casino cheats. He told the one about seven employees who also turned out to be vendors. About some high rollers who one casino flew out to Vegas, only to find out they were scammers. The more Jonas talked, the less Poindexter noticed the black pants and T-shirt. He stopped noticing how different Jonas was from most people in the room.

Poindexter believed that the casino and the government had essentially the same problem. They were both looking for hidden connections, both on the watch for threats in their midst. Poindexter knew technology better than he did gambling, and in NORA, he saw potential.

 

When Jonas stepped into Poindexter's office at DARPA headquarters, his eyes went immediately to the large photographs of Poindexter and Ronald Reagan hanging on the wall. Candid shots of an abundantly confident president and his obviously enamored aide. The pictures, snapped by the White House photographer, were a point of pride. Poindexter had hung similar photos on his family room wall, where he kept his most cherished memorabilia.

Poindexter was enamored of Jonas already. Bob Popp could see that. The question now was how to get NORA into some experiments. After a few minutes listening to Jonas's Vegas cops-and-robbers stories, Popp could see that he was living in a world of information. Jonas spoke with a fluency and ease that Popp had never seen. He rose up and sketched out examples on a whiteboard hanging on Poindexter's wall. He wrote names, jotted down imaginary phone numbers, and worked through the mechanics of connecting them.

Neither Popp nor Poindexter was a database expert. They understood concepts and systems. But Jonas was into the inner workings, the gears and sprockets. And he was intense. His eyes lit up and his voice took on a contagious eagerness. Jonas was like a frenzied car mechanic, hauling everyone under the chassis to explain how the engine worked. Soon they all wanted to be mechanics.

Jonas was also guileless. When someone used a word he didn't know, he asked what it meant. He confessed that he didn't read books and that he never finished college. No question, even the impertinent ones, stayed locked inside his head for very long. And when it came time to listen to Poindexter and his vision for TIA, Jonas didn't bother hiding his skepticism.

In the casinos, NORA started with known bad guys and tried to sort out their relationships. The tool didn't do pattern analysis, which was, at least in part, what Jonas believed Poindexter was after. Jonas had done that kind of work for corporate marketers, building them giant databases of consumer behavior so they could better model consumer buying habits and interests. Companies could lay their hands on reams of personal information—people's hobbies, their income, what sports they preferred, what magazines they read—all from public sources or surveys. But even with all that raw material, Jonas knew that the ability to predict whether someone would subscribe to
Golf Digest
, or was likely to travel to Ireland, or would buy a brand of soda was incredibly low.

That was fine for companies making money on the margins. Even a 1 or 2 percent success rate correctly predicting someone's shopping list could translate into millions of dollars in extra revenue. But to catch terrorists the government had to be right every time.

NORA was an investigative tool and, Jonas thought, had a much narrower application than what Poindexter seemed to envision. It started with a bad guy. But Poindexter wanted to find bad guys who no one knew existed yet.

“I don't think you're going to get it to work the way you want to,” Jonas said.

But the admiral was willing to roll the dice. Jonas might not have built the most sophisticated or elegant program. But at that moment, no one had come up with a better way to catch terrorists. And there was the obvious fact that Jonas understood how to live in data better than anyone. He'd come along at just the right time.

Poindexter brought Jonas on board as a consultant. He eventually put NORA into service, testing whether it could connect entities in those synthetic worlds, Ali Baba and Vanilla. Poindexter and Popp both thought the program showed promise, although it didn't perform as well as they'd hoped. Still, Jonas was full of ideas, and those could be more valuable than any one tool. For the next several months Poindexter and Jonas stayed close. Jonas had good thoughts, and Poindexter admired his unconventional spirit. They were an unlikely duo. The Wizard and the Wild Man. But somehow, they worked.

By the summer of 2002, Poindexter had been getting ready to award a set of new contracts and looked forward to a series of new experiments. He was also approaching the halfway point of his presumed one-year tenure. In August, TIA would have its official “coming out,” at the annual DARPATech conference in Anaheim, California. It was Poindexter's first big public appearance since returning to government.

But something was missing. On the critical question of privacy protection in the TIA system, he still had little to show. Just a few proposals had come back from the broad announcement. A scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center, a storied facility, had returned a promising plan, and Poindexter intended to give her a contract. But he still wasn't making enough headway in building a privacy appliance and incorporating it into his prototype.

There was, however, a development brewing on the sidelines. Before Poindexter returned to government, DARPA was considering whether to convene a study group to look at the balancing act of privacy and security, from a technical perspective. Every summer the agency sponsored inquiries on a range of big topics, all run by outside experts. They volunteered their time to do the research and write a final paper. (The suggestion for the privacy study came from a senior researcher at Microsoft, who'd been part of the previous summer's round.)

When Poindexter opened the Information Awareness Office he learned that the privacy study was up for consideration. He immediately agreed to sponsor it.

The final report was due out in December, but the panel held a number of meetings to generate ideas. It gave them a chance to put Poindexter's concept through closer scrutiny.

That summer the panelists invited Fran Townsend to attend a meeting. Poindexter was pleased to have her, since she'd been frank about the legal hurdles he faced yet generally agreed that his concept was solid. But the group also brought in some sharp skeptics, a pair of noted electronic privacy experts, including one of the toughest Poindexter would ever face.

His name was Marc Rotenberg, and he had an abiding institutional memory of the government's historic forays into citizens' private lives. A graduate of Harvard College and Stanford Law, Rotenberg cut his teeth as counsel to Senator Patrick Leahy on the Judiciary Committee. He was currently the president and executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, EPIC, which had been at the center of the privacy debate since 1994. The group was established to alert the public to emerging threats against the Constitution, particularly those rising from the ever-expanding stores of personal data compiled by corporations and the government. EPIC had a broad mandate, and at times it seemed kept alive solely by Rotenberg's unceasing and humorless work ethic. He was a tireless activist and frequent speaker, as at home providing congressional testimony as he was giving sound bites to reporters. If Poindexter really wanted to be challenged, there was no one better for the job.

The meeting convened at the Institute for Defense Analysis, a Washington think tank. Poindexter noticed that Rotenberg didn't say much during the formal discussions. So he approached him during the breaks.

“We need your help thinking about how to provide security and privacy,” Poindexter said. Rotenberg said he understood, and he thought increased oversight would help. Poindexter seemed to think they were on the same page there, since he wanted TIA to monitor its own users. That was a kind of oversight, he thought.

Poindexter wasn't sure Rotenberg was with him on that. And he didn't think Rotenberg had given him, or the panel, any constructive suggestions.

The meeting lasted several hours. No one shouted. And no one told Poindexter to scuttle his project. But it was hard to imagine how anyone could. The privacy study was restricted to the question of whether technology could protect privacy. It didn't ask whether the government
should
build the ever more powerful data aggregators that, everyone agreed, posed a threat to privacy in the first place.

As far as Poindexter was concerned, he had opened the floor to debate. But the panel's final report suggested that it was already on his side. “Our thesis is that technology can allow us to make substantial progress towards supporting
both
privacy
and
national security,” the authors wrote, placing special emphasis on the win-win approach that Poindexter himself had advocated. The study recommended “key technical strategies” for protecting innocent people's data. They were all concepts that Poindexter had been pitching for months. Selective revelation and the immutable audit log topped the panel's list.

The panelists were genuinely qualified to assess the concepts. Poindexter believed that he had invited criticism; Rotenberg had the chance to chime in. As far as Poindexter was concerned, he had made the effort and the overture. He was sparking the policy debate he wanted to have.