John Poindexter Quotes

• I made a very deliberate decision not to ask the President, so that I could insulate him from the decision and provide some future deniability for him if it ever leaked out.

  John Poindexter

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• You accept failure as a possible outcome of some of the experiments. If you don’t get failures, you’re not pushing hard enough on the objectives.

  John Poindexter

• We wanted to be as expansive as possible to make sure we didn’t preclude some good ideas.

  John Poindexter

• Uncontrolled access to data, with no audit trail of activity and no oversight would be going too far. This applies to both commercial and government use of data about people.

  John Poindexter

• TIA was being used by real users, working on real data – foreign data. Data where privacy is not an issue.

  John Poindexter

• One of the reasons I continue to speak out is that the solutions to the counterterrorism problem involve other parts of the national security community – especially other elements of the Department of Defense, State, FBI, Homeland Security and the staff.

  John Poindexter

• Nobody – myself included – believes that we could ever achieve total information awareness. But the government needs to set goals and long-range objectives. Total information awareness is a good goal.

  John Poindexter

• It would be ideal if we could have an uncontrolled flow of information. But we realized you can’t do that.

  John Poindexter

• I think it is very difficult today to have a reasoned public discourse on any controversial subject. Certainly, election years present a complicating factor.

  John Poindexter

• I think if I had to do it over again, I’d do it the same way. I would just put more resources into getting the public diplomacy part much stronger than we were able to.

  John Poindexter

• I really believe that we don’t have to make a trade-off between security and privacy. I think technology gives us the ability to have both.

  John Poindexter

• I knew from the beginning that privacy was going to be a huge issue, especially with regard to applying Total Information Awareness in counterterrorism. Because if the technology development was successful, a logical place to apply it was inside the United States.

  John Poindexter

John Poindexter (12)

Birth:	12th August, 1936
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Naval Officer

About

John Marlan Poindexter was born in Indiana, USA. He is a retired United States naval officer. He was Deputy National Security Advisor and National Security Advisor for the Reagan administration. He was convicted in April 1990 of multiple felonies as a result of his actions in the Iran–Contra affair, but his convictions were reversed on appeal in 1991. From January 2002 to August 2003, he served as the Director of the DARPA Information Awareness Office. He earned a BS degree from US Naval Academy, Annapolis in 1958. He earned an MS degree in Physics in 1961 and a PhD in Nuclear Physics in 1964 both from California Institute of Technology.

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