[via Spook Country-In Progress-W/Spoilers?] thread on the William Gibson books discussion forum:
RobW
OK - it's in the TimesTalk podcast "Cyber Author" (scroll down - unfortunately it's a 34MB mp3), where wg is interviewed by Brent Staples, at about 60:13. It's possibly not as much of an overview as I thought but I stealthed my minitranscript anyway for those of you who want to go hog wild speculation-wise.
Brent Staples: I know often times writers don't want to talk about their works in progress, but what can you tell us about the novel you're working on now?WG: Well, it's got some... the NSA's Echelon-USA base in Sugar Grove, West Virginia will probably be mentioned at least once, but... one of the... I wonder... what can I say about this thing? It's got a fair bit about something called "illicit facilitating", which is a kind of law-enforcement-and-anti-terrorism speak for the people that the bad guys hire to do the stuff that's a little too complicated for them to do. And there are a lot of these IFs, so-called... there are a lot of them in the world today and they're a real problem, because they'll... y'know, if you're a bad guy with a lot of money they're the ones who'll do what you need done. And I thought that these... reading about the illicit facilitators, I thought about the cowboys in Neuromancer...
Staples: The samurai...
WG: Yeah, and that, in fact, was what those guys... that was sort of what I'd imagined there, so I wanted to try to put some in the world today. So I started trying to build America's smallest ethnic crime family as part of this narrative and I came up with these people who live in... a family, really, not a very big family, they live in Manhattan, they're literally Cuban-Chinese by inter-marriage and they were, before they came here, a sort of very secretive part of Cuba's equivalent of the KGB, and the father, the godfather and founder of this outfit, just didn't, yknow, want to have to live in Cuba anymore, so using the skills that he and his family had they just sort of translated themselves here about ten years ago.