Order and chaos: the CIA’s HYDRA database and the dawn of the information age

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the summer of 1967, with antiwar and civil rights protests dominating the news, U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson tasked law enforcement and intelligence agencies with investigating links between domestic civil unrest and foreign governments, particularly the Soviet Union. One of the outcomes was HYDRA, a CIA-led counter-intelligence database intended to leverage novel digital information technology to uncover previously unseen links to foreign threats. The paper argues that conceptualizing HYDRA as technological system which mobilized resources from across the federal government as well as from foreign partner agencies, allows us to raise larger questions about the impact of information technology on intelligence work: How did computer technology change everyday practices within intelligence and security services? Did public opposition to computerization efforts contribute to a critical discourse within Western societies associating security databases with attacks on freedom and democracy? Did the use of computers contribute to a new culture of security that shifted attention from great power rivalries to technological, networked or transnational threats which became characteristic of the Information Age?