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How did you zero in on John Poindexter as the protagonist in this story?Back in 2002 and 2003, I was 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...
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...
You trace the rise of the American surveillance state to the Beirut bombings in 1983?There were all of these clues about terrorist attacks against the Americans in Lebanon that the intelligence community had failed to piece together. When I realized that this was sort of the beginning of suicidal...
Congress recently extended the Patriot Act. What do you make of that?We've crossed into this era where surveillance and surveillance capabilities in the government are just a reality, and I don't think you're going to see Congress taking away that authority. They'll try and tighten...
To what extent do you think the outrage over Total Information Awareness - with its name and its logo, the all-seeing eye - was a p.r. problem?A lot of it was a p.r. problem. You had the name, which was scary, the logo, which was just preposterous - I mean, it...