My op-ed in today’s New York Times looks at a decade of secret government surveillance and why we’re still powerless against it.

Could “total information awareness” have prevented the killings in Colorado? No. Here’s why.

C-SPAN has been re-airing my book talk from the International Spy Museum in Washington. This was on February 18, publication day for The Watchers.

The New York Times review is in today’s paper. Eric Lichtblau, no stranger to the opaque world of surveillance, gave it strong praise:

“it uses smart technical analysis and crisp writing to put the reader inside the room with the watchers and to help better understand the mind-set that gave rise to the modern surveillance state.”

“At its best ‘The Watchers’ provides an insightful glimpse into how Washington works and how ideas are marketed and sold in the back rooms of power, whether the product being peddled is widgets or a radical model for intelligence gathering.”

This week, I’ll have an online discussion at Slate with my friend and fellow intelligence author, Patrick Radden Keefe. We’ll be talking about The Watchers, my relationship with John Poindexter, the limits of surveillance, and the future of privacy.

The United States is fighting a new kind of war, but the first shots were fired a generation ago. Check out my feature story in Washingtonian about the rise of cyber security in the U.S. government, told through the tales of two key actors.

In light of recent reporting, I want to recall two previous stories on the revival of the Total Information Awareness Program and its connection to the NSA’s surveillance efforts. You can view all my NSA reporting here.

With all the recent attention on the National Security Agency’s surveillance program–particularly that it was the so-called “data mining” aspects that drew Alberto Gonzales and Andrew Card to John Ashcroft’s hospital room back in 2004–I thought it was a good time to recall a story I wrote last summer. This story goes into considerable detail [...]

People like to say that the world changed on 9/11. That it became a more confusing place. But for two men, as buildings and bodies burned, the world became much clearer.On the morning of September 11, 2001, John Poindexter, a 65-year-old retired rear admiral and President Reagan’s onetime national security adviser, was driving to his [...]

A controversial counter-terrorism program, which lawmakers halted more than two years ago amid outcries from privacy advocates, was stopped in name only and has quietly continued within the intelligence agency now fending off charges that it has violated the privacy of U.S. citizens.Research under the Defense Department’s Total Information Awareness program — which developed technologies [...]