Just days after the 9/11 attacks, Poindexter was sitting in front of DARPA’s new director with a briefing presentation titled “A Manhattan Project for Combating Terrorism.” Poindexter pitched his vision of a massive technology program to combat terrorism on the scale of the World War II race to build the atomic bomb. Poindexter’s idea was to create a massive data-mining system capable of aggregating databases across government and the private sector and then pulling out warnings of the next September 11 attack. Poindexter proposed another Manhattan Project, made up of top researchers from
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