Books : After : Excerpts

From After: How America Confronted The September 12 Era

At 3:30 Ed Woollen and two other Raytheon executives, along with two lawyers from their well-connected law firm, were ushered into the Vice President's ornate old conference room in the Executive Office Building. There, they met with Peterman from Ridge's office, as well as members of the Vice President's staff and a senior aide in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

The meeting had been arranged by one of Raytheon's lawyers, Larry Levinson, a longtime Washington hand who was a partner at Raytheon's Washington law firm. Levinson, who is friendly with Cheney chief of staff Lewis Libby, had gotten Libby to convene the meeting so that he could bring the Raytheon people in to brief relevant White House officials on what Raytheon thought it could do to help the government get a handle on its immigration problem. Peterman, who by now was knee-deep in trying to figure out how to build the entry-exit system that Congress had mandated, was glad to be there.

Woollen began with his standard spiel about Raytheon's experience at the airports with baggage scanning machines, then gave an overview of his efforts since September to organize Raytheon to meet the challenges of homeland security. From there, he segued into what they wanted to talk about today, which was "visitor management."

Peterman seemed amused by the euphemism.

As Woollen continued, an aide began to set up a PowerPoint presentation. But as invariably happens when a tech company tries to demonstrate its tech prowess, he couldn't boot it up. After a few long minutes and some nervous laughter from the Woollen side of the table, he finally got it to work, and Woollen continued.

Raytheon's great market dominance in spy satellite software, he explained, was because the company was so good at mining billions of bits of data. Now they would bring the same skills and capacity to visitor management by creating a system that would "keep terrorists out, deport the ones who get in, detect illegal overstays, and manage students on visas."

Where do I sign up? Peterman thought.

Woollen continued, outlining the options Raytheon had for biometric identifiers -- iris scans, fingerprints, palmprints, and even a new face scan that could be done reliably from twenty feet away, and not only served as an identifier but also detected enough "vascular changes" in a face to make it "a first order of lie detector." Woollen didn't mention that Raytheon actually subcontracted out all that high-tech stuff to smaller companies in the field, whose products Raytheon would buy and assemble into a working system.

To screen people, the data would be mined through a system that Raytheon called Genesis, which, Woollen explained vaguely, could track "certain patterns of behavior" that indicated someone was a threat.

None of that was enough by itself, Woollen added. The real value Raytheon added was that the Raytheon system would be "proactive." Once a visitor arrived here, his data would be constantly updated, so that everything he did would be "tracked during the entire lifetime of the visa." If he got into trouble here and was wanted by the police, or even if new information about his prior activities was developed by Genesis, he'd be placed on a new lookout list so that he could be apprehended.

Depending on your point of view, it was all fascinating, scary, or encouraging. But Peterman and the man from the White House science office also knew that it was wildly expensive. To take one example, how could they pay for the biometric scanners -- whether of the iris, the palm, or the face -- at every border crossing? And how would someone be apprehended once put on a lookout list? Where would all the checkpoints be?

Nonetheless, these Raytheon guys seemed determined to build a system that, in some form, had to be built, so Peterman gave them the name of the procurement people at INS who were overseeing the development of the entry-exit system, and said they should get a meeting over there. He added the now standard speech that all homeland security staffers had learned -- which was that they did not make any purchasing decisions.

If nothing else, the session with Woollen and his colleagues gave Peterman some ammunition if the INS people told him they hadn't been able to find anyone with a vision of how this could be done.

Woollen felt the meeting was a success, because, he explains, "You always have to make the rounds on projects like this. You go from office to office, from the White House to the agencies, to Capitol Hill, laying groundwork, sounding people out, and accumulating information."