John Poindexter

So we talked about that for 45 minutes to the irritation of everybody else around us.

Now I discovered, I saw a picture of him with Ronald Reagan and realised I was talking with Admiral John Poindexter, who is a good Welsh socialist I'm not meant to like.

I mean, I've Democrat friends in Boston who almost ostracise me because I defend him, all right? I mean, myself and a lead Democrat went on the hill when the Congress came after him, but he's a very bright guy, all right? And I worked for him for years, right? And one of the things we both worked on is somebody asked us simultaneously in DC once, you know, what do you think about this AI stuff? And we said, everybody's neglecting the training data sets.

That's still the case today.

So just to refresh, the memories of some people as far as tech, right? So what happened after 9-11 was obviously there was a lot of awareness around, hey, there was there were information silos and there was not a lot of sharing of information.

So then there was a big initiative run by the Pentagon called the Information Awareness Project led by Admiral John Poindexter.

which didn't really play out as they wanted but fast forward to 2006 you started seeing big data technologies like hadoop And by 2007, 2008, I started running across startups who were starting to become aware that, hey, the Pentagon and the government might be good places to sell our wares, right? And obviously now, fast forward to today, that that that hesitance has largely disappeared, and you have the rise of firms like Palantir.

So anyway, so do you have any kind of stories along the same lines?

Uh, the one on the left is, uh, written by me, uh, and it's, uh, entitled, uh, From Ground Zero to Panopticon: Revealing the Surveillance State.

Now, this is, uh, looking at the past 25 years and what, uh, was enabled by 9/11, beginning with the Patriot Act, but also talking about, uh, John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness program, uh, and all the various, uh, Snowden leaks and, and bringing us right up to date.

Uh, and then on the right-hand side there, you see, uh, an article that I wrote jointly with, uh, Catherine Austin Fitts, uh, called The Vectors of Grift.

And in this, we're talking about the, uh, the, the trades, the put options and so on that were, uh, taking place, uh, during September 2001 on United Airlines and on, uh, American Airlines.

[clicks tongue] The other thing I think is, there was that, ugh, what the fuck is that guy's...

John Poindexter, the DARPA guy-

Yes

... who was the total information awareness guy, who was trying to push that through Congress, and it got shut down 'cause it was just too draconian and it was too, like, way too much for the early 2000s.

It asks for the whole haystack and promises it will only look for the needles.

Total Information Awareness, Information Awareness Office, John Poindexter's shop, sitting under DARPA, a hexagon logo that looked like it was designed by a man who had never met a voter.

William Sapphire writes, you are a suspect in the Times.

Congress hears passports, visas, credit cards, tickets, gun purchases, and sees a domestic vacuum.

yeah.

John Poindexter ran it, and Shane wrote a wonderful book about it.

And the question he raised there was...

Well, what would it even mean to keep these data streams separate anymore? Or what would it even mean to try and put fetters on state actors when they're using public information? So, you know, when you say Flock is cross-referencing plates with people's identities and then in turn with, say, their closest relatives...

So I wanted to start where I guess your book starts.

Could you tell people about something that you call Admiral Poindexter's Dream?

Sure.

So back in 2003, towards the end of July, the New York Times broke a story that the Department of Defense, a particular research unit in the Department of Defense called DARPA, the Defense Advanced Projects Research, I forget now exactly the acronym, but DARPA was launching prediction markets where anonymous traders or bettors could take positions on such things as and coups and terrorist attacks, so geopolitical events.

They talked about the possibility of, you know, people making money, you know, by planning and then, you know, betting on terrorist attacks and so on.

And it was shut down.

And Admiral Poindexter, whom some people will know from the Iran-Contra affair in a previous generation, he was the brainchild.

It was his brainchild, rather.

And then this moved from the realm of an unsuccessful policy to a great scandal.

When John Poindexter, who succeeded Bud McFarland as National Security Advisor, and his aide, Oliver North, decided to take the profits from the sale of weapons to Iran and to funnel the profits to the Contras in Nicaragua, these anti-communist rebels, even though Congress had passed the Bullen Amendment forbidding aid to the Contras.

And so this was... a scandal that blew up in Reagan's face in 1986.

He could have actually been impeached because of it.