Keeping Track of John Poindexter

By Paul Boutin, 02:00 AM Dec. 14, 2002 PT

The head of the US government's
Total Information Awareness
project, which aims to root
out potential terrorists by
aggregating credit-card,
travel, medical, school and
other records of everyone in
the United States, has
himself become a target of
personal data profiling.

Online pranksters, taking
their lead from a San
Francisco journalist, are
publishing John Poindexter's
home phone number, photos of
his house and other personal
information to protest the
TIA program.

The photos of John Poindexter's house are found here: cryptome.

Related story: wired

Matt Smith, a columnist for
SF Weekly, printed the
material -- which he says is
all publicly available -- in
a recent column: issues.

"Optimistically, I dialed
John and Linda Poindexter's
number -- (301) 424-6613 --
at their home at 10
Barrington Fare in Rockville,
Md., hoping the good admiral
and excused criminal might be
able to offer some insight,"
Smith wrote.

"Why, for example, is their
$269,700 Rockville, Md.,
house covered with artificial
siding, according to Maryland
tax records? Shouldn't a
Reagan conspirator be able to
afford repainting every seven
years? Is the Donald Douglas
Poindexter listed in Maryland
sex-offender records any
relation to the good admiral?
What do Tom Maxwell, at 8
Barrington Fare, and James
Galvin, at 12 Barrington
Fare, think of their spooky
neighbor?"

Smith said he wrote the
column to demonstrate the
sense of violation he felt
over his personal records
being profiled by secretive
government agencies.

"I needed to call Poindexter
anyway, and it seemed like a
worthy concept that if he's
going to be compiling data
that most certainly will leak
around to other departments
and get used, one way to get
readers to think about it was
to turn that around," Smith
said.

What Smith didn't realize
was that Poindexter's phone
number and other information
would end up on more than 100
Web pages a week later as
others took up the cause.

Phone-phreaking hackers
supplied details on the
Verizon switch serving the
admiral's home. The popular
Cryptome privacy-issues
website posted satellite
photos of the house.

cryptome

Poindexter could not be
reached for comment for this
story, and calls to his home
phone now reach a recording:
"The party you are calling is
not available at this time."

Since the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency
began awarding contracts for
the Total Information
Awareness project in August, wired, the effort has been
criticized by both civil
rights advocates and data-
mining experts.

wired

The dispute over TIA seems
to fall not along straight
political party lines, but
between advocates and
opponents of the government's
right to monitor its own
citizens. Former President
Clinton expressed support for
the project in a recent
public appearance, while
conservative New York Times
columnist William Safire
recently wrote a pointed
editorial criticizing the idea.

One Bush voter, speaking on
condition of anonymity, said
of the pranks on Poindexter:
"If they're making him as
uncomfortable as we are,
good."