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Many critics have written more eloquently than I ever could about what makes this novel great. It shows in exquisite and often painful detail how our adult personalities are shaped by our own choices (which may not be as free as we think they are) and by powerful forces beyond our control. Maugham has a remarkable ability to evoke a vivid, realistic world with seemingly simple prose. Warning: not a happy fun book...
...covering technology and the government, and I was writing about the Total Information Awareness program, which he was running at the Defense Department. I was never able to get an interview with him, but after he left government, I ran into him at a conference. I said, "Would you ever be willing to sit down with me and do interviews?" and he said he would do it on the condition that I would come out to his house and we would do multiple interviews and it would all be on the record. What a burdensome request...
What was unique about TIA?One was the scope of it. No one to that point had ever proposed trying to go out and find patterns of suspicious activity in data that was held in private hands. He wasn't just talking about mining through CIA reports and FBI reports and NSA reports and all the three-letter agencies. He wanted to actually go out and plug into credit-card databases and bank transaction records and the telecom networks and plane and car reservation rental records and all of this kind of stuff...
...other piece of it that was unique and that nobody has ever replicated was this idea of using technology to enhance privacy by encrypting the identities of the people whose data you're collecting. In terms of scale, he'd often described it as sort of a Manhattan Project for counterterrorism, and I think that was an apt description. (See "FBI Broke Privacy Laws, Says Justice Department Probe...
...fact of his history. He will forever be associated with Iran-Contra, and that means he will forever be associated with public deception. I don't think that he was ever going to be a credible spokesperson for a project with this kind of creepy ambition, if I can call it that. So it was sort of doomed from the start...