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

The problem we were struggling with within the closed market was what the incentive would be. You probably wouldn't use dollars. But those are all questions that need to be explored.

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.

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.

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.

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

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