Slate.com has an extended dialog with Shane Harris, the author of The Watchers: The Rise of America’s Surveillance State. Here’s the prelude:
The Watchers is really a book about [Admiral John] Poindexter, the visionary Ph.D., former national security adviser, disgraced Iran-Contra conspirator, and father of one of the most far-reaching and reviled surveillance initiatives of the post-9/11 era, Total Information Awareness. The Bush administration gagged Poindexter when TIA ignited a firestorm in Congress in 2003, and after being removed from his position at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (the Pentagon’s R & D shop, known as DARPA), the admiral appeared to recede from the national stage. But he gave you unprecedented access—14 long interviews about his philosophy and career—and in your book, he emerges not as the caricature civil libertarians have come to know and loathe but as a nuanced, surprisingly sympathetic character.
I’d imagine this is an interesting piece for folks interested in organizations or regulatory policy generally. I look forward to reading this one.