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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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