Past haunts Pentagon data-mining technology guru

John Poindexter stood before a room of mostly strangers, looking like a college professor. On a screen behind him flashed impenetrable-looking diagrams filled with different-colored shapes marked "privacy appliance," "pattern-based query," "distributed databases." Poindexter explained each one in detail, willing the crowd to understand. This was part of his masterwork, the solution to a problem he'd pursued all his life: How to know everything.

Poindexter calls it "Tia," for Total Information Awareness. He uses the acronym like a woman's name. TIA is a hypothetical system of information technologies and analytic processes that Poindexter believes would allow U.S. officials to predict and prevent terrorist attacks. He hardly could have had a more receptive audience than the security experts, academics and technologists gathered before him at a counterterrorism symposium at Syracuse University in March.

Poindexter introduced TIA to the Defense Department in October 2001, after the Sept. 11 attacks appeared to show that the world's smartest intelligence services were incapable of connecting dots in a line of intelligence pointing to the assaults. Poindexter believes TIA might have put those dots together.

In the July 15 issue of Government Executive, Technology Editor Shane Harris explores Poindexter's struggle to overcome the criticism attached to his brainchild and his history with the Reagan administration. Click here to read the full story.