John Poindexter Quotes
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.
Dreifus, Claudia. "A Conversation with John M. Poindexter; Turning a Mountain of Data Into a Counterterrorism Tool." The New York Times, 24 Feb. 2004, p. F2.
He was the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The intelligence and law enforcement advocates of reducing privacy rights so that law enforcement can prevent acts of terrorism frame the question as a tradeoff between civil right and safety. However, as Leahy and many others point out, we would not be much safer if we gave up all our ivil rights. Further, hundreds of thousands of American have given their lives so that we would have those civil rights. Without them what are we protecting.
Critics of NSA observe that there is a fundamental difference between government invasion of privacy and that of corporations in that the Government can deprive a citizen of his/her liberty or even life while corporations can just invade their privacy, embarrass them, or hurt their economic status. Counter-critics rejoinder is that 99 percent of all the specific abuses of privacy and damages to citizens in the U. S. from massive data collection are made by private corporations, not the NSA or other government agencies.
In 1967 Cunningham headed a CIA study group reviewing U. S. Intelligence operations.
He was the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
He was trying to assuage the anger and anxiety when it became public that the NSA had been monitoring all the calls of American citizens and not only suspected terrorists. He made the distinction between metadata and content. He claimed NSA was gathering the phone numbers of the parties on the call, the time and duration, but not listening in to the contents. Critics asked how he could be sure and that if the agency were gathering all the data, they could easily listen to any. Later the agency admitted that it had “inadvertently” examined the content of some communications.
The call for embedding the balance in the law is in contrast to the past where the balance was left to the discretion of the intelligence agency leadership but technological limitations curtailed their ability to unbalance things too much.
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John Marlan Poindexter is a retired United States naval officer and Department of Defense official. He was Deputy National Security Advisor and National Security Advisor for the Reagan administration. He was convicted in April 1990 of multiple felonies as a result of his actions in the Iran–Contra affair, but his convictions were reversed on appeal in 1991. More recently, he served a brief stint as the director of the DARPA Information Awareness Office for the George W. Bush administration. He is the father of NASA astronaut and U.S. Navy Captain Alan G. Poindexter.
