Critical Code Studies: The Terrorist Database System

In the midst of the cold war, the U.S. Department of Defense
was beginning its efforts to track terrorists using
databases enhanced with scruffy AI. Early prototypes
attempted to model how terrorists shared knowledge in
order to determine how these organizations might take
advantage of associations. While scholars have analyzed
the textual trail of terrorists and counter-terrorism
efforts, examining the code of one of these early models
reveals the ways in which terrorists were conceived
in this time period. This paper uses the methodology
of Critical Code Studies to show what this LISP source
code and design documents say about the cultural moment
in which the military attempted to model geopolitical
insurgencies.