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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.