The New Yorker
December 6, 2002 | home
COMMENT
TOO MUCH INFORMATION
by Hendrik Hertzberg
Issue of 2002-12-09
Posted 2002-12-02
When it comes to concocting fevered visions of the future as a way of illuminating the
present, Jules Verne got some things right in his time, Aldous Huxley got others, and
George Orwell got still others. In our time—in this terror-haunted interlude (we hope) of
background-hum dread and well-founded paranoia—no literary divinator gets it righter
than the sci-fi pulp master Philip K. Dick, author of "Clans of the Alphane Moon" and
dozens of other books, and inspirer of some of Hollywood's spookiest dystopias,
including "Blade Runner," "Total Recall," and "Minority Report." And this is odd, given
that he has been dead for twenty years. Too bad he's not still around. It would be
interesting to get his take on the Information Awareness Office of the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense.
The Information Awareness Office plays it so weird that one can't help suspecting that
somebody on its staff might be putting us on. The Information Awareness Office's
official seal features an occult pyramid topped with mystic all-seeing eye, like the one
on the dollar bill. Its official motto is "Scientia Est Potentia," which doesn't mean
"science has a lot of potential." It means "knowledge is power." And its official mission
is to "imagine, develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate and transition information
technologies, components and prototype, closed-loop, information systems that will
counter asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness."
The phrase "total information awareness" is creepy enough to merit a place alongside
"USA Patriot Act" and "Department of Homeland Security," but it is not the Information
Awareness Office's only gift to the language. The "example technologies" which the
Office intends to develop include "entity extraction from natural language text,"
"biologically inspired algorithms for agent control," and "truth maintenance." One of the
Office's thirteen subdivisions, the Human Identification at a Distance (HumanID)
program, is letting contracts not only for "Face Recognition" and "Iris Recognition" but
also for "Gait Recognition." (Tony Blair has pledged the full coöperation of the Ministry
of Silly Walks.) Another of the thirteen, FutureMap, "will concentrate on market-based
techniques for avoiding surprise and predicting future events"—a sounder approach,
ideologically, than regulation-based liberal soothsaying.
http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?talk/021209ta_talk_hertzberg (1 of 3) [12/6/2002 8:34:03 AM]
The New Yorker
The Information Awareness Office is working on some really cool stuff that will
eventually turn up at Brookstone and the Sharper Image, like a Palm Pilot-size PDA that
does instantaneous English-Arabic and English-Chinese translations. But the Office's
main assignment is, basically, to turn everything in cyberspace about everybody—tax
records, driver's-license applications, travel records, bank records, raw F.B.I. files,
telephone records, credit-card records, shopping-mall security-camera videotapes,
medical records, every e-mail anybody ever sent—into a single, humongous, multi-
googolplexibyte database that electronic robots will mine for patterns of information
suggestive of terrorist activity. Dr. Strangelove's vision—"a chikentic gomplex of
gumbyuders"—is at last coming into its own.
It's easy to ridicule this—fun, too, and fun is something the war on terrorism doesn't offer
a lot of—but it's not so easy to dismiss the possibility that the project, nutty as it sounds,
might actually be of significant help in uncovering terrorist networks. The problem is
that it would also be of significant help in uncovering just about everything, including
the last vestiges of individual and family privacy. This is why William Safire wrote the
other day that the program should simply be shut down, as was Attorney General
Ashcroft's Terrorism Information and Prevention System (TIPS), which was going to
enlist postal workers and the like as amateur spies.
At a minimum, a temporary shutdown, pending some sort of congressional review and
the creation of safeguards, would seem to be in order. It will take years for total
information awareness to get beyond the prototype stage. But if a working system ever
does get up and running, you won't have to be Philip K. Dick to imagine the possibilities
for mischief, especially if carelessness, to say nothing of malevolence, enters the picture.
But not to worry. "The privacy of individuals not affiliated with terrorism" will be
protected via "technologies for controlling automated search and exploitation algorithms
and for purging data structures appropriately."
And who is offering this highly reassuring assurance? Why, the Director of the
Information Awareness Office, John M. Poindexter, that's who. The Office's Web site
offers biographical sketches of the new agency's principal bureaucrats—or did offer them
until the night of November 26th, when they mysteriously disappeared. Poindexter's is,
or was, in the form of a résumé, of exactly the kind one would submit to a prospective
corporate employer. It is a model of the genre: two crisp pages, neatly typed, no oddball
fonts. The career it describes—Caltech Ph.D., flag-rank naval officer, White House senior
staffer, high-tech business executive—is impressive. On the other hand, the information
provided falls somewhat short of total. The passage concerning Poindexter's stint as
Ronald Reagan's national-security adviser concludes as follows:
Major events in which he played a significant role included: Strategic Defense Initiative, Grenada
Rescue Operation, Achille Lauro incident, Libyan Operation to respond to terrorist attacks, Reykjavik
Summit with Soviets, peaceful transition of government in the Philippines, support for the democratic
resistance in Nicaragua, and an attempt to begin rationalization of U.S. relationship with strategically
important Iran.
http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?talk/021209ta_talk_hertzberg (2 of 3) [12/6/2002 8:34:03 AM]
The New Yorker
Cryptologists will detect in the last two items a reference to what made Poindexter, for a
time, famous: the scheme to sell arms secretly to the mullahs of Iran and use the
proceeds to get around a congressional ban on funding the anti-Sandinista guerrillas of
Nicaragua. Poindexter's role in what became the messiest political scandal of the
nineteen-eighties got him convicted of five felonies (including two counts of lying to
Congress) and sentenced to six months in the federal penitentiary. He was saved from
jail by an appeals-court ruling that his trial had been tainted by his own testimony, given
under a grant of immunity, before a congressional committee. The facts of the case,
however, stand. So does the conclusion of the trial judge, Harold H. Greene, that
Poindexter's actions traduced the principle "that those elected by and responsible to the
people shall make the important policy decisions, and that their decisions may not be
nullified by appointed officials who happen to be in positions that give them the ability
to operate programs prohibited by law."
But even when intentions are good, as conservatives should know, it's not enough. (The
F.B.I. was supposed to be a bunch of clean-cut guys chasing bank robbers, but by the
mid-sixties it was putting tape recorders under Martin Luther King's bed and urging him
to commit suicide.) We may not always have a leader as punctilious about civil liberties
as President Bush—and even he has some people around him (Poindexter, for one;
Ashcroft, for another) whose devotion to the Bill of Rights sometimes seems shaky.
Maybe the Administration needs to catch up on its sci-fi reading. Philip K. meant his
dark visions as warnings, not as bureaucratic charters for George W. Unfortunately,
Bush doesn't know Dick.
http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?talk/021209ta_talk_hertzberg (3 of 3) [12/6/2002 8:34:03 AM]