Ted Phillips and the 1997 Mapping of Information Warfare

By Miriam Adler · September 10, 2026

While the government fought to break encryption in 1997, a consultant for the intelligence community was mapping the gaps in our privacy—a plan kept unclassified only in its most sanitized form.

The people who believed their private communications were secure in 1997 were not just mistaken; they were being mapped. Their privacy was treated as a technical vulnerability to be solved, a gap in a fence that the state decided it had a right to climb.

In April 1997, a briefing was issued that treated the architecture of the emerging internet not as a public utility, but as a theater of operations. The record we have is the archive's curated description of the briefing, and while the full pages are not here, the summary reveals a clinical approach to the dismantling of digital anonymity. The document, titled "System Security and Information Warfare: Networks at Risk," was authored by Ted Phillips, a man who would later move from the shadows of government contracting to become the president and CEO of the Chicago Bears, the NFL franchise where he served as only the fourth president in the organization's century-long history.

Phillips was writing on behalf of Booz-Allen & Hamilton, the McLean, Virginia-based contractor that functions as the outsourced nervous system for the American intelligence community, providing the analysis and engineering that allows the state to scale its surveillance apparatus.

The Price of a Backdoor

To understand why this briefing existed, one must look at the climate of 1997. The government was engaged in a desperate, public struggle to ensure that no one could send a message it could not read. This was the era of the Security and Freedom Through Encryption (SAFE) Act, a legislative push to mandate that encryption technology be designed with "backdoors" for law enforcement.

While the public debate happened in the halls of Congress, the technical blueprints for this intrusion were being drawn by firms like Booz Allen. The public record shows a frantic opposition to the SAFE Act. Marc Rotenberg, the director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center who spent decades fighting the government's habit of warrantless surveillance, testified before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on March 20, 1997, warning that the act would destroy the very security it claimed to protect. He was joined by Jerry Berman, the executive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a watchdog that fought to prevent the state from treating every citizen's computer as a potential crime scene.

Even the corporate world felt the heat. Ira Rubinstein, a senior corporate attorney at Microsoft representing the Business Software Alliance, argued that the government's demand for encryption keys would hand a master key to any adversary capable of stealing it. But while the lawyers and activists argued over the law, Ted Phillips was delivering a briefing on the "warfare" aspect of the network.

Document imagery from nsarchive.gwu.edu From the files: nsarchive.gwu.edu

Networks at Risk

Phillips' briefing did not frame the issue as a legal debate over the Fourth Amendment. It framed it as a matter of "Information Warfare." According to the record, the briefing focused on "telecommunications industry trends (with respect to architecture, technology, and privacy), network vulnerabilities, threats and case histories."

This is where the connection becomes clear: the "trends" in privacy that the government was fighting in the SAFE Act hearings were the same "vulnerabilities" Phillips was mapping for his clients. The public record of the SAFE Act shows a government terrified of a world where it could no longer listen. The Phillips document shows the intelligence community's response: a systematic study of how to reduce "exposure to risk"—which, in the lexicon of a defense contractor, means ensuring the state is not the one being locked out.

Most telling is the inclusion of "notable individual hackers and organizations" in the briefing's case histories. The record presents these as examples of "threats," but the timing suggests a deeper purpose. By 1997, the intelligence community was no longer just looking for spies in embassies; they were looking for the people who understood the plumbing of the internet better than the government did.

The Unclassified Facade

There is a violent contradiction between the title of the document and its contents. The title explicitly mentions "Information Warfare," yet the summary describes a benign focus on "strategies to reduce exposure to risk." Warfare is not about risk reduction; it is about the application of force to achieve a political objective.

If the shape of this file is what it appears to be, the "unclassified" label is a mask. The desk's reading is that this briefing was a sanitized, public-facing version of a far more aggressive strategic deliverable. Booz Allen does not get paid millions of dollars to provide general summaries of "industry trends." They are paid to provide actionable intelligence.

The pattern suggests that the offensive capabilities—the "Warfare" half of the title—were entirely excised from this version. While the summary speaks of "reducing risk," the actual work performed by Booz Allen for its intelligence clients typically involves the identification and exploitation of the very vulnerabilities Phillips mentions. The gap between the aggressive title and the defensive summary is shaped exactly like a redaction. The missing pages almost certainly contained the specific mapping of those "vulnerabilities" to actionable exploitation vectors.

The Architecture of Control

Furthermore, the desk's reading is that the analysis of "notable individual hackers" was not a cautionary study intended to help networks defend themselves. In the world of intelligence contracting, mapping the capabilities of non-state actors is the first step toward two things: targeting or recruitment. By profiling the individuals who could break into these networks, Phillips was providing the government with a directory of the most dangerous—and therefore most useful—minds in the digital underground.

This briefing functioned as the technical justification for state-mandated access into private telecommunications. By framing privacy as a "vulnerability" and encryption as a "risk," Booz Allen provided the intellectual cover for the SAFE Act and the subsequent decades of surveillance. They turned the right to be left alone into a security flaw.

When we look at the trajectory of Ted Phillips—from mapping the vulnerabilities of the American public to managing one of the most visible sports franchises in the world—the irony is thick, but the logic is consistent. Whether in the boardroom or the briefing room, the goal is the same: the management of an asset. In 1997, the asset was the American network, and the goal was to ensure that no matter how high the walls of encryption grew, the state always held the ladder.

If a full, unredacted release of the Booz Allen files from this period were to occur, the desk's reading is that we would find a comprehensive menu of exploitation. We would see that the "risk reduction" Phillips wrote about was never intended for the users of the network, but for the agency tasked with watching them. The cost of that "security" was the permanent loss of digital sanctuary, a debt that we are still paying today.

Ted Phillips and the 1997 Mapping of Information Warfare

The Price of a Backdoor

Networks at Risk

The Unclassified Facade

The Architecture of Control

Sources