He requested Hayden to proportion it; Hayden became him down. The databases have been the agency’s crown jewels, the made from many years of investments in assortment know-how, desktops, and human capital. yet Hayden’s resistance wasn’t only a subject of turf safeguard. For years, different rival intelligence corporations had sought entry to castle Meade’s databases, so that it will run a few test or pursue an time table in their personal. yet SIGINT research was once an esoteric distinctiveness; uncooked information may sire faulty, even harmful, conclusions if put in untrained fingers. And what Alexander desired to do with the data—“traffic analysis,” as NSA fingers known as it—was fairly liable to this tendency. Coincidences weren’t evidence of causation; a shared aspect of contact—say, a cell quantity few suspicious humans occurred to call—wasn’t facts of a community, less a conspiracy. castle Belvoir had a very flaky checklist of pushing accurately those types of flimsy connections. In 1999, years earlier than Alexander arrived, his predecessor, significant common Robert Noonan, had arrange a unique place of work referred to as the Land info conflict task, quickly replaced to the data Dominance middle. one in every of its experiments was once to determine even if a working laptop or computer software might instantly notice styles in information at the Internet—specifically, styles indicating international penetration into American examine and improvement courses. artwork funds, the assistant secretary of security for command, keep an eye on, communications, and intelligence, had funded the scan, and, whilst it used to be accomplished, he and John Hamre, the deputy secretary of safeguard, went to Belvoir for a briefing. Noonan displayed an unlimited scroll of pictures and charts, displaying President Clinton, former secretary of safeguard William Perry, and Microsoft CEO invoice Gates posing with chinese language officers: the inference that China had infiltrated the top ranks of yank executive and undefined. Hamre used to be outraged, in particular because the briefing had already been proven to a couple Republicans in Congress. Noonan attempted to safeguard this system, announcing that it wasn’t intended as an intelligence research yet really as a type of science-fair venture, displaying the technology’s probabilities. Hamre wasn’t amused; he close the venture down. The architect of the venture used to be Belvoir’s leader expertise adviser, a civilian engineer named James Heath. extreme, self-confident, and intensely introverted (when he talked with colleagues, he didn’t glance down at their sneakers, he appeared down at his personal shoes), Heath used to be fanatical concerning the power of monitoring connections in titanic data—specifically what could later be referred to as “metadata. ” Hamre’s slam may need intended the tip of a few careers, yet Heath stayed on and, while Alexander took command of castle Belvoir in early 2001, his fortunes revived. the 2 had recognized one another because the mid-1990s, while Alexander commanded the 525th army Intelligence Brigade at citadel Bragg, North Carolina, and Heath used to be his technology adviser. They have been engaged on “data visualization” software program even then, and Alexander used to be inspired with Heath’s acumen and single-mindedness.