John Poindexter Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.