John Poindexter Quotes
It would be ideal if we could have an uncontrolled flow of information. But we realized you can't do that.
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 referring to China which has gone to great length to censor and control the Internet going into China.
The Green Party and The Socialist Party had combined in an alliance. This was their publication. In addition to showing that the right to know and freedom of information was a major issue in other industrial democracies as well as the United States, the quotation is particularly interesting because the title of the article was used over 200 years before by none other than the American patriot, Patrick Henry. See {60328}. The phrase has been used many times in many lands since.
The first non-PRI President in over 70 years.
He was referring to the massive surveillance NSA program whereby all telephone calls and most digital communications for every American was secretly tapped and stored in an NSA data base. The Senators of the Intelligence Oversight Committee received information in Classified executive sessions but they were not allowed to disclose anything that they learned in the briefings—even something as huge and probably unconstitutional as this program. Moreover, even when officials of the Intelligence Services lied under oath (see {634917}) in open session, the Senators could not disclose this fact.
This quotation illustrates that government use of censorship and classification to cover up errors and mistakes in not just a modern phenomenon. It is a technique that government’s will gravitate to whenever they have the chance.
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.
