The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State
Shane Harris
Language: English
Pages: 432
ISBN: 1594202451
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Our surveillance state was born in the brain of Admiral John Poindexter in 1983. Poindexter, Reagan's National Security Advisor, realized that the United States might have prevented the terrorist massacre of 241 Marines in Beirut if only intelligence agencies had been able to analyze in real time data they had on the attackers. Poindexter poured government know-how and funds into his dream-a system that would sift reams of data for signs of terrorist activity. Decades later, that elusive dream still captivates Washington. After the 2001 attacks, Poindexter returned to government with a controversial program, called Total Information Awareness, to detect the next attack. Today it is a secretly funded operation that can gather personal information on every American and millions of others worldwide.
But Poindexter's dream has also become America's nightmare. Despite billions of dollars spent on this digital quest since the Reagan era, we still can't discern future threats in the vast data cloud that surrounds us all. But the government can now spy on its citizens with an ease that was impossible-and illegal-just a few years ago. Drawing on unprecedented access to the people who pioneered this high-tech spycraft, Harris shows how it has shifted from the province of right- wing technocrats to a cornerstone of the Obama administration's war on terror.
Harris puts us behind the scenes and in front of the screens where twenty-first-century spycraft was born. We witness Poindexter quietly working from the private sector to get government to buy in to his programs in the early nineties. We see an army major agonize as he carries out an order to delete the vast database he's gathered on possible terror cells-and on thousands of innocent Americans-months before 9/11. We follow General Mike Hayden as he persuades the Bush administration to secretly monitor Americans based on a flawed interpretation of the law. After Congress publicly bans the Total Information Awareness program in 2003, we watch as it is covertly shifted to a "black op," which protects it from public scrutiny. When the next crisis comes, our government will inevitably crack down on civil liberties, but it will be no better able to identify new dangers. This is the outcome of a dream first hatched almost three decades ago, and The Watchers is an engrossing, unnerving wake-up call.
ensued when Alberto Gonzales, the president’s lawyer, and White House chief of staff Andy Card showed up at Ashcroft’s hospital bedside, pressuring him to sign the authorization instead. Ashcroft unceremoniously sent them packing. Comey, along with Goldsmith, was prepared to resign if the NSA’s activities weren’t brought under legal control. Ashcroft would join them, along with FBI director Robert Mueller. President Bush personally intervened to avert a mass resignation of his entire law
Journal, a nonpartisan Washington political magazine. The programs had moved, and their funding sources remained intact. As recently as October 2005 SAIC had won a $3.7 million contract for more work under Topsail, the new name for Genoa II. The story quoted Tom Armour, one of Poindexter’s former program managers, who said that the NSA unit absorbing TIA had pursued technologies that would be useful for analyzing large amounts of phone and e-mail traffic. “That’s, in fact, what the interest is,”
the other hostages in his diary at night, calling them by their first names and displaying an almost familial fondness and concern. In April, just weeks after Buckley’s kidnapping, the White House sent four new antiterrorism laws to Congress, an early effort to shore up holes in national defenses and to take a more offensive posture. In a public statement accompanying the bills, the president’s aides coined a new phrase: “war against terrorism.” The White House threw down the rhetorical
phone calls and faxes as they traversed massive undersea cables, snooped on military communications and diplomatic correspondences. If it traveled on a wire, a fiber-optic cable, or on a wave through the air, the NSA could grab it. But this new monitoring would require significant assistance from the companies that controlled the telecommunications system. Fortunately, because of the midnineties surveillance law that required those companies to build equipment that could be monitored, the new
youngest in the department’s history, and Poindexter had come to work for Admiral James Holloway, the chief of Naval Operations, as his executive assistant and all-around right-hand man. Years later Poindexter and Rumsfeld met again at the White House. Poindexter was on Reagan’s NSC staff when Rumsfeld was the president’s chief emissary to the Middle East during the hostage crisis. They had battled the fires of suicidal terrorism, each from different positions. And while their professional