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Poindexter's Defense Of 'Data Mining'
by Ted Leventhal
John Poindexter on Monday defended his work on "data mining" during his tenure at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
The former admiral and national security adviser, who resigned his post at DARPA last fall, told a conference of corporate security executives in California that his efforts to create the Terrorism Information Awareness (TIA) program to search databases for information on potential terrorists was misunderstood by policymakers and the public. He also said he became an easy target for political opponents.
The debate became confused, said Poindexter, who portrayed himself as a patriotic researcher. Press reports said DARPA would "implement" TIA "and that I was going to run it," he added. "That was not so." Poindexter said it was laudable to pursue a technology that one day could analyze all known information.
"While we must acknowledge that total information awareness probably is not possible, in the creative process, in thinking about research and development, it provides a broad context for researchers to think about the problem," Poindexter said. "I don't advocate that we will ever reach total information awareness, but it is a reasonable objective."
Poindexter said the genesis for the program began during his tenure in the Reagan administration, when the White House created a crisis-management center to compile intelligence from all sources, identify situations early and avoid crises by "prevention or pre-emption."
From 1996 through 2002, Poindexter said DARPA spent $42 million on Project Genoa, an effort aimed at putting the power of modern computing to work predicting future crises and addressing the "asymmetric threats" posed by terrorists. After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Poindexter said he was frustrated that while Genoa had achieved progress toward "tools and concepts" for information analyses, they were not being adopted by defense and intelligence agencies.
He decided to talk to DARPA's director and urge him to "establish a new office on information awareness and invest substantial amounts of money" in the pursuit of new technology. DARPA opened that office in January 2002, and Poindexter oversaw it. Privacy concerns generated by the TIA program and other work prompted Congress to end the program in 2004.
That does not mean the research ended, however. "Suffice it to say that some work continues" in the classified Defense Department budget, Poindexter said.
Poindexter maintained that privacy would not have to be compromised for TIA to work, but he said more research is needed toward a privacy solution. Data mining will be a crucial tool for fighting terrorism, he insisted.
"Terrorist organizations' main weapons system is people, and for those people to take adverse action against the United States, they must travel, conduct surveillance, procure explosives, ping against a server, get through [network] firewalls," he said. "The point is that they will be making transactions," Poindexter added, and finding signs of the transactions is difficult.
"In order to find signal in the noise, we have to consider potential new sources of information," he said, "and in the information society we live in today, there is an enormous amount of information, with many reasons to collect it."
FCC Taps Telecom Liaison To States
The FCC has made senior management changes recently. On Monday, the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau established an intergovernmental affairs office to serve as a liaison between the FCC and state, local and tribal governments on telecommunications issues. Sue McNeil, the bureau's special counsel for intergovernmental affairs, will lead the office.
McNeil worked for the FCC's Wireless Telecommunications Bureau from 1994 to 1996. Later, she became senior attorney for federal regulatory affairs at Sprint and director of government affairs at Lucent Technologies before rejoining the FCC in 2003.
Also the Wireless Bureau named Thomas Derenge to be deputy division chief for engineering and Renee Roland Crittendon to be associate division chief of the mobility division. Derenge previously was chief of the FCC's spectrum policy branch; Crittendon was a senior attorney adviser in the competition policy division.
Software Group Hires Senior Executives
The Business Software Alliance (BSA) also has named several new senior executives to its U.S. and international operations.
Jesse Feder joins BSA's Washington office as director of international trade and intellectual property, where he will be responsible for issues like copyright protection, piracy and trade law. Feder previously had a long tenure at the U.S. Copyright Office, most recently as special legal adviser to the register of copyrights.
His duties also included general responsibility for bilateral copyright matters with countries in the Asia/Pacific region, and he helped negotiate and draft key pieces of legislation, including the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Benoit Muller joins BSA's Brussels, Belgium, office as director of software policy. He comes to BSA from the International Publisher's Association in Geneva, where he was most recently secretary-general.
Also Seow Hiong was named BSA's software policy director for Asia and will be based in Singapore. He previously was an attorney with the Singapore law firm of Rajah & Tann, where he specialized in technology and intellectual property law.
Elsewhere in the private sector, Spain (Woody) Hall, an assistant customs commissioner and the chief information officer for U.S. customs, has moved to Science Applications International Corp. to become a corporate vice president for project management. Hall will work on business strategy and customer support, among other responsibilities. At customs, now part of the Homeland Security Department, Hall supervised a major reorganization of the agency's information technology systems. Earlier, he served as the CIO at the Energy Department.
'Waffles' And Kerry: A Google Match
Conservative Internet pranksters have launched a coordinated campaign to manipulate the Google search engine to list Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry's Web site first under searches for "waffles," USA Today reports.
Ken Jacobson, a Duquesne University law student, is coordinating the effort. "It's political fun and a bit sophomoric," he told the newspaper, "but I believe George W. Bush is a man of conviction and a man of his word. I can't say the same for Sen. Kerry."
The prank is payback for an earlier stunt that linked Bush's biography at whitehouse.gov with the search term "miserable failure."
In other political news, consumer advocate Ralph Nader's presidential campaign is running Internet advertisements warning young Americans that they will be subject to a military draft in the next Bush administration. The "Message to America's Students" warns that "the Pentagon is quietly recruiting new members to fill local draft boards" and that "young Americans need to know that a train is coming, and it could run over their generation."
A Nader spokesman said the warning is based on the U.S. Selective Service's recent calls for draft-board volunteers, the ongoing war in Iraq and congressional calls to expand the military. A Pentagon spokesman told the Boston Herald that the Pentagon has no plans to re-implement a draft and that draft-board calls are routine.
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