John Poindexter — American Public Servant born on August 12, 1936,

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... (wikipedia)

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.
Nobody - myself included - believes that we could ever achieve total information awareness. But the government needs to set goals and long-range objectives. Total information awareness is a good goal.
I really believe that we don't have to make a trade-off between security and privacy. I think technology gives us the ability to have both.
We wanted to be as expansive as possible to make sure we didn't preclude some good ideas.
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.