The Way of the Knife by Mark Mazzetti Read Free Book Online

behemoth.
    Back then, U-Turn was relying on somewhat clunky technology to make money. The company signed agreements with content providers and set up a marketing campaign to drive consumer traffic to Web sites owned by their clients. From there, customers could download an icon to their mobile phone that would act as a “portal” to the Internet. But during this paleolithic era of mobile phones, U-Turn found few clients ready to take advantage of its service.
    U-Turn widened its hunt for clients by teaming up with pornography companies to figure out ways to stream video porn to cell phones. One of its partnerships was with a business producing a low-budget program called Czech My Tits , which featured a man walking the streets of Prague, giving women five hundred Czech koruna if they exposed their breasts to the camera. U-Turn was hired to help stream the pictures and audio to mobile phones. Bill Eldridge, a former company executive, recalls that the flesh business seemed like a path to riches. “In building a business like that, you want to target either the porn industry or the intelligence world,” he said. “Those are the only people who have the money to pay for that kind of stuff.”
    Having dabbled in porn, Obrman got his opportunity to tap the intelligence market when he ran into Furlong in Las Vegas. The two actually had met in the Balkans in the 1990s and they spent hours swapping stories about the Cold War and the bloody ethnic conflicts that came after the fall of the Berlin Wall. They shared identical views about the importance of spreading American ideals abroad, especially in the Muslim world. But Furlong also represented a tremendous business opportunity for U-Turn.
    Once Furlong began his job at SOCOM, he talked to Obrman and other U-Turn executives about developing video games that people throughout the Middle East could download to their mobile phones. For SOCOM, the games could address two problems at once: that a great many people in the Muslim world disliked the United States and that the United States knew very little about who those people were. Furlong was interested in building games that could influence the user’s perceptions of the United States and also collect information about who was playing the games. It was a potential intelligence bonanza: Thousands of people would be sending their mobile-phone numbers and other identifying information to U-Turn, and that information could be stored in military databases and used for complex data-mining operations carried out by the National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies. The spies wouldn’t have to go hunting for information; it would come to them.
    It was just one aspect of a web of programs that had escalated in the years since the September 11 attacks to feed information into sophisticated computer databases to hunt for patterns of activity that could be evidence of future terrorist plots. If large quantities of personal information could be poured into the databases, the thinking went, computer algorithms could sift through the data and make connections that human-intelligence analysts couldn’t.
    But the laws governing these activities were murky at best. One Special Operations Command initiative that would eventually become controversial involved collecting information about American citizens suspected of having ties to militant groups. The data was stored in computer servers in Virginia, and some military officials began to worry that they might be breaking laws that regulate how the Defense Department can collect information about citizens. Looking to move the databases offshore, officers overseeing the program for SOCOM would eventually ask Michael Furlong to house the databases at U-Turn’s headquarters, in Prague, a move that would lead to a dramatic fight between Furlong and the CIA.
    By the middle of 2006, U-Turn had put together a glossy, twenty-seven-page presentation for a pilot program for the Pentagon to use in