Director of the DARPA Information Awareness Office, Admiral John Poindexter wrote: “In January 2002 the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is part of the Defense Department, established an Information Awareness Office to focus on technologies to help counter terrorism. We established a new research and development program, now called the Terrorism Information Awareness program, to test ways to find information faster, share information across agencies, aid in conducting analysis and enable better decision-making. The goal is to help the government ‘connect the dots’ and prevent foreign terrorist attacks. …But it is a myth that the Information Awareness Office intends to develop some kind of system to spy on Americans. The terrorism information program is not and never has been intended for use in surveillance against Americans. The program’s research is aimed at detecting foreign terrorist planning. The experiments have used only data from foreign sources, data that is legally available to all agencies that participated. There is no use of credit-card, banking or other data on United States citizens.” [The 15th of the month used for date sorting purposes only.]
– John Poindexter, “Finding the Face of Terror in Data,” The New York Times, Sep. 10, 2003