The Culture of Surveillance Revisited: Total Information Awareness and the New Privacy Landscape

Abstract

It's late November 2002 on a drizzly, cold day in Washington, D.C., a little more than a year after four hijacked planes crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsyl vania killing more than 3,000 people. In one of the bewildering number of Starbucks ofFDupont Circle, Jeff Bezos, iconoclast lead er of the mega online e-tailer Amazon.com, and John Poindexter, then director of the Pentagon's Office of Information Awareness, meet. Bezos orders a low-fat latte. Poindexter, ex-Regan national security advisor and a convicted felon charged with lying to Con gress and obstruction of justice, takes an Americano (of course). Poindexter gets right to the point. Poindexter: Jeff, we have a problem. The world has changed dramatically. During the years I was in the White House it was relatively simple to identify our intelligence collection targets. Today, the most serious asymmetric threat facing the United States is terrorism, a threat characterized by collections of people loose ly organized in shadowy networks that are difficult to identify and define and whose goals are the destruction of our way of life. The intelligence collection targets are thousands of people whose iden tities and whereabouts we do not always know. It is somewhat analogous to the antisubmarine warfare problem of finding sub marines in an ocean of noise—we must find the terrorists in a world of noise, to understand what they are planning, and develop options for preventing their attacks. I think the solution is largely associated with information technology. We must become much