[Spooks] THE WATCHERS: The Rise of America’s Surveillance State

[Al Fansome]

The New York Times
February 23, 2010
Books of The Times
The 
People We Pay to Look Over Our Shoulders
By ERIC LICHTBLAU

THE WATCHERS

The Rise of America’s Surveillance State

By Shane Harris

Illustrated. 418 pages. Penguin Press. $27.95.

At this very moment analysts at the National Security Agency some 30 miles
 north of the White House are monitoring countless flashpoints of data —
 cellphone calls to “hot” numbers, an e-mail message on a suspicious 
server, an oddly worded tweet — as they carom around the globe like 
pinballs in cyberspace.

The snippets of information could conceivably lead them to Anwar al-Awlaki, a fugitive cleric in Yemen 
whose fiery sermons have inspired violent jihadists. Or to the next 
would-be underwear bomber. Or, much more likely in the 
needle-in-a-haystack world of cyber detection, it might lead to nothing 
at all — at least nothing of any consequence in determining Al Qaeda’s 
next target.

This is the world of modern eavesdropping, or 
signals intelligence, as its adherents call it, and for many years it 
operated in the shadows. “The Puzzle Palace,” the 1983 best seller by 
James Bamford that remains the benchmark study of the N.S.A., first 
pulled back the curtain to provide a glint of unwanted sunlight on the 
place. And the years after the Sept. 11 attacks — a period in which the 
surveillance agencies’ muscular new role would lead to secret 
wiretapping programs inside the United States, expansive data-mining 
operations and more — gave rise to public scrutiny that made the place a
 veritable greenhouse of exposure.

As each operation has come to 
light, an anxious public has wanted to know whether this powerful new 
surveillance model was undermining traditional notions of privacy and 
civil liberties. Just whom is the government watching? And who is 
watching the watchers? Nominally, the answer is all three branches of 
government: a secret court that approves surveillance warrants, 
Congressional oversight committees and the intelligence agencies 
themselves are supposed to be policing the spy-catchers to guard against
 abuses.

But this rarely amounted to what lawmakers like to call 
“vigorous oversight”; in the Bush administration, in fact, the 
surveillance court and the oversight committees were intentionally 
bypassed on the most sensitive programs. More often, it has been left to
 outsiders — journalists, authors, civil rights advocates and privacy 
groups — to keep tabs on the watchers and to bring public scrutiny to 
once-secret programs. Indeed, it was outside scrutiny that brought 
attention to many of those at the heart of the debate, from Total 
Information Awareness, created after 9/11 to President George W. Bush’s 
warrantless wiretapping.

For the spymasters, this spotlight was 
decidedly unwelcome. “The fact that we’re doing it this way,” Mike 
McConnell, a director of intelligence in the Bush administration, said a
 few years ago in the midst of the fierce public debate over government 
surveillance powers, “means that some Americans are going to die.” Mr. 
McConnell is one of the recurring characters in “The Watchers: The Rise 
of America’s Surveillance State” by Shane Harris, but this is not a book
 that Mr. McConnell is likely to rush out to buy. Mr. Harris, with some 
success, does what Mr. McConnell and others in the intelligence world 
have found so objectionable: he watches the watchers.

While Mr. 
Harris’s examination covers a fair amount of ground that has already 
been well plowed, it uses smart technical analysis and crisp writing to 
put the reader inside the room with the watchers and to help better 
understand the mind-set that gave rise to the modern surveillance state.
 “We have never lived in a time,” Mr. Harris writes, “when the 
government has had such remarkable technological ability to watch its 
own citizens.”

The unlikely tour guide for this journey into the 
netherworld of surveillance operations is John M. Poindexter, the 
retired Navy admiral and former national security adviser who was the 
driving force behind the Total Information Awareness program, which 
would become a potent symbol of government overreach soon after 9/11. 
Mr. Harris, who writes about surveillance issues for National Journal, 
interviewed Admiral Poindexter 14 times in researching his book, and the
 insight into the intellectual framework that guided him provides one of
 the strengths of the book.

Following “15 years in the 
wilderness,” after Admiral Poindexter’s involvement in the Iran-contra 
affair during the Reagan administration, Mr. Harris writes, he returned 
to government in 2002 as the point man in the effort to develop a 
data-mining program at the Pentagon that could put together all the 
disparate pieces of intelligence data — communications, travel, finances
 and more — to “connect the dots” and prevent another calamitous attack 
after 9/11. But soon enough a public outcry over the research program 
led Congress to cut off funding.

But the approach has outlived 
the controversy. As Mr. Harris first described in detail in National 
Journal in 2006, the remnants of that effort were simply repackaged and 
parceled out to other agencies, principally the N.S.A.

At its 
best “The Watchers” provides an insightful glimpse into how Washington 
works and how ideas are marketed and sold in the back rooms of power, 
whether the product being peddled is widgets or a radical model for 
intelligence gathering. Mr. Harris takes the reader along in 2002 as 
Admiral Poindexter goes from office to office at the Pentagon and the 
White House, seeking allies for his fledgling intelligence project, 
putting on PowerPoint presentations, finding agencies willing to link 
their data to Total Information Awareness, navigating potential legal 
pitfalls and hearing cautionary tales about previous ventures into data 
mining, like the F.B.I.’s Carnivore e-mail program a few years earlier.

“Learn
 from their example,” Fran Townsend, a senior intelligence official, 
tells Admiral Poindexter of the Carnivore debacle. “Don’t make the same 
mistakes.”

Unfortunately, the book suffers at times from the same
 Achilles’ heel that plagued Admiral Poindexter: in picking his targets,
 Mr. Harris — like the watchers themselves — sometimes veers off the 
mark in determining where to look and in separating the important from 
the trivial. He spends too much time and ink going down rabbit holes, 
examining in great detail operations like Able Danger, a data-mining 
program at the Pentagon that became briefly notorious because of the 
erroneous claim by a few military officials who worked on it that it had
 been able to identify Mohammed Atta, the 9/11 hijacker, as a possible 
threat before the attacks.

Even the examination of the Total 
Information Awareness program, as richly detailed as it is, proves a bit
 of a red herring. Mr. Harris acknowledges that Admiral Poindexter was 
seeking to do the type of data mining that the N.S.A. had already been 
doing, and would continue to do, on a much broader scale. Yet 
information about how the N.S.A. has been using is new data-mining tools
 — a difficult target, to be sure — is in short supply.

Meanwhile,
 largely unanswered is a core question surrounding the new surveillance 
model and the fancy data-mining algorithms that come with it. Does this 
stuff really work? Can data-mining tools originally developed to find 
Las Vegas card counters and cheats actually identify would-be 
terrorists? When the question is addressed, the results are 
discouraging. Mr. Harris recounts one test run by the N.S.A. of the 
tools that Admiral Poindexter had developed: “The T.I.A. tools crashed. 
They were simply incapable of processing so much information in real 
time. Like balloons affixed to a fire hydrant, they burst.”

The watchers, it seems, have plenty to watch. The problem is that much of 
the time, they may not know what they’re looking at. 		 	   		  
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