Information Awareness Office

Information Awareness Office
The logo of the real-life Information Awareness Office
Other names	IAO
Type	Government org
Founder	Admiral John Poindexter
Founded	February 2002
Disestablished	December 2003 (officially)
Status	Active
Affiliation	Coalition
Allies	FIRSTLIGHT Special Affairs Division
Headquarters	Pearl Harbor Naval Station
Allegiance	Second Inquisition
Leader	Admiral Roberto Farrier

The Information Awareness Office, or IAO for short, is an officially defunct American governmental agency that currently serves as one of the cornerstone orgs of American involvement in the Second Inquisition.

(For the real-life agency, see Information Awareness Office.)

History

The average Joe on the street can easily find out the origins of the IAO, if they were ever given a reason to. In January 2002, in response to the 9/11 attack only four months prior, the American veteran secret warrior Admiral John Poindexter established an office inside the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency with the goal of establishing “Total Information Awareness” of all possible threats to the United States. Every half-baked and experimental program in the DARPA inbox got massive funding, directed to such tasks as analyzing every post or email on the global Internet, identifying specific suspects at long distance using millimeter-wave radar, and most famously briefly establishing a “futures market” in crisis analysis - a pitch-friendly term hiding the fact that some two-bit sociologist just wanted to use the 'invisible hand of the free market' to make psychohistory real.

Poindexter’s team prodded at the anomalies in several global economic and political maneuvers until it discerned a very concerning outline. When it coupled those analyses with the new OTFI financial profiles, the IAO identified a number of Camarilla assets within the higher councils of American corporations and government. The Ivory Tower's tools found themselves slowly cut out of the flow of real power and information — and occasionally, surgically removed from America entirely.

Poindexter called on his old Reagan-era network of assets and conspirators, now influential administrators in the national security establishment. They freed up platoons of CIA paramilitaries, squads of NRO “security specialists,” and even a Navy SEAL team or two. Dominated thralls, ghouls, and even a few foolishly “hands-on” Ventrue found themselves awakening in black sites in the sunny, sunny tropics, invited over holy waterboarding to share more details of the “vampire terrorist conspiracy” IAO had found.

During this first wave of blind strikes in 2002, the IAO brought the True Death to, among others, a sewer-dwelling would-be spymistress in Ciudad Juárez named Xóchitl. This kill allowed Xóchitl's ghoul, NSA director Felicity Price, to begin using her own first-hand knowledge of the Kindred to plan a new org dedicated entirely to tracking down these enigmatic 'blankbodies': FIRSTLIGHT.

The Camarilla managed to manipulate Congress into officially defunding the IAO over civil liberties concerns in October 2003; hardly a stretch to push. But despite no longer existing to Congress' knowledge, various IAO programs simply submerged back into the Pentagon’s secret assets and continued under other names. Poindexter’s hand-picked successor, Admiral Roberto Farrier, continued and accelerated his work.

The new covert IAO, along with FIRSTLIGHT and the newly-refunded Special Affairs Division, had the manpower of the Project Twilight old guard redistributed among them, and this new-and-improved Project Twilight laid the groundwork for the formation of the American branch of the Coalition.

Operations

For what little official capacity the IAO exists in, it serves as a minor branch of the broader US Department of Defense. This allows it to direct the U.S. military response to the supernatural, providing command and control for everything from covert insertions into a blankbody compound in Thailand to a deniable Predator strike on a Sabbat meeting in Mozambique. A submarine sinks a ship on the way to the Gehenna War, a container of thermobaric warheads finds its way into a Mexican cartel’s arsenal, a billion dollars drops into the Society of St. Leopold’s hospital network. In its spare time, it greenlights DARPA projects with anti-paranormal promise and launches XScopes on spy satellites. The IAO classifies whatever operations it can and disguises whatever it can't as “training missions” or “counter-terrorist strikes.”

The purpose of the Information Awareness Office is straightforward: in the terms of its own mission statement from all the way in the Bush administration, the IAO seeks to cultivate “total information awareness” about all threats to the United States of America. It’s an ambitious statement, to be certain, and, unsurprisingly, the IAO defines the United States of America in this context to mean first and foremost the government of the United States and its operations. And it handles anything “too messy” for its sibling agency, the Special Affairs Division.

Without a direct line to main command authority, the IAO has limits: It can rarely muster more than a few Predator drone strikes or submarine-launched cruise missiles, a company of deniable paramilitaries or renditions to one or two carefully guarded black sites in the Indian Ocean or Micronesia. But the IAO does have a tap into the so-far limitless American clandestine operations and surveillance budget, and willingly spends its lucre on anyone and anything that might burn out one more haven.

While FIRSTLIGHT serves as the main representative of the U.S. at Coalition planning sessions, IAO retains an outsized influence on how blankbodies are countered and pursued globally. This influence partly stems from its record of burned havens and terminated leeches, but mostly from money. Master manipulators of the US government’s undisclosed black budget, the IAO can channel billions of dollars direct cash payments or loan guarantees into the coffers of any organization that plays ball with the Coalition – and plays by IAO rules.

One of the IAO's greatest assets, and one of the most sought-after resources in the entire Coalition armory, is the Heartbeat algorithm, which sifts through the neverending waterfall of ECHELON’s real time global data streams looking for evidence of vampiric and other supernatural activity.

Personnel

• Admiral Roberto Farrier: Director
• Admiral John Poindexter: former Director
• Colonel Linda Kellogg: Chief Information and Analysis Officer
• Lieutenant Colonel Amos Tyrell: Operations Officer, BRICS Theater

Gallery

References

• VTM: Second Inquisition
• HTR: 5th Edition Core Book
• VTM: Camarilla