Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
One might oppose the CIA program, but Abu Ghraib it ain't.
There is an unarguable downside to unbreakable encryption.
After the attacks on September 11th, we all learned lessons.
Accusations fit on a bumper sticker; the truth takes longer.
I've often said that the ISIS-Syria-Iraq mess is about as bad as it could be.
I was an intelligence officer for what was then 8th Air Force, B-52 Air Force.
Nothing more threatens Vladimir Putin than not being able to track his own citizens.
The problem with cyber weapons for a country like ours is the ability to control them.
The attorney general is the only one who can authorize what's called an emergency FISA.
The use of these techniques against these terrorists made us safer. It really did work.
People don't question American power. What people need to be convinced of is American will.
I think the Sino-American relationship is the most important geo-strategic question facing us.
This program has been successful in detecting and preventing attacks inside the United States.
National security looks different from the Oval Office than it does from a hotel room in Iowa.
A person seeking to be the President of the United States should not suggest violence in any way.
Responsibility demands action, and dealing with the immediate threat must naturally be a top priority.
There's still a lot of things you can legitimately do to make America safe through electronic surveillance.
Presidents get to decide how their intelligence is served up to them, and it's the job of intelligence to adjust.
It's hard to brief in the Oval. You know, you can't - no visual aids, hard to roll out something in front of somebody.
What Edward Snowden did amounted to the greatest hemorrhaging of legitimate American secrets in the history of my nation.
There is no worse place for an intelligence service like CIA to be than on Page 1, above the fold in your daily newspaper.
The arc of technology is in the direction of unbreakable encryption, and no laws are going to get in the way of that reality.
I blame the Russians for a lot, but pinning the creation of ISIS on them is a murky, tenuous, triple-carom bank shot at best.
Great weight should be given to the judgment of professionals on what information, if disclosed, would harm national security.
An intelligence analyst may attribute an attack to al Qaeda, whereas a policy maker could opt for the more general 'extremist.'
The Constitution defends all of us against unreasonable search and seizure. What constitutes reasonableness depends upon threat.
Our inaction created the opportunity for the Russians to reenter the Middle East in a powerful way for the first time since 1973.
I don't want to be overly dramatic, but Iraq and Syria are gone, and they aren't coming back, at least not as centralized states.
There's a bigger difference between the first and second Bush administrations than there is between Bush and Obama. That's really true.
Once you're in a network, you can do a whole bunch of things to that network. It's just that NSA doesn't have the authority to do that.
The point I wanted to make was, as we have moved forward on the war on terrorism, FISA has been increasingly effective in terms of results.
A writer of fiction lives in fear. Each new day demands new ideas, and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not.
Public discussion of how we determine al Qaeda intentions, I just - I can't see how that can do anything but harm the security of the nation.
If we don't get our relationship with the emerging People's Republic of China right, that is something that could lead to global catastrophe.
As much as we might look for opportunities to keep Iraq together, we need to be prepared for the reality that it's not going to stay together.
Xi agreed to the American definition of legitimate espionage. In other words, you don't use the power of the state to steal secrets for profit.
My literal responsibility as director of the CIA with regard to covert action was to inform the Congress - not to seek their approval; to inform.
People have a right to privacy, but they also have a right to live. Fundamentally, we need cybersecurity and need to secure communications as well.
Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith was equally insistent in 2002-2003 about an operational relationship between al Qaeda and the Iraqi government.
My experience has been that military assessments on 'how goes the war' are consistently more optimistic than those made by the CIA and other agencies.
Access to the security clearance database would disgorge even more detailed personal information, including the foreign contacts of American officials.
In the great battle of Antietam, still the bloodiest day in American history, Union forces were led by Gen. George McClellan, an incredibly cautious man.
Anger can be a useful emotion; it's built into our genetic code to help with self preservation. But it can also be destructive, even when it is justified.
CIA relies on a partner's focus, linguistic agility, and cultural depth; in return, the partner benefits from CIA's resources, technology, and global view.
Intelligence is often viewed as a profession that steals secrets and then knits those secrets together for policymakers in order to inform their judgments.
President Obama and his successors are dependent on the 100,000-plus people inside the American intelligence community - the people Edward Snowden betrayed.
In my heart of hearts, I don't think it's a good position to say that Guantanamo is not an acceptable answer for anyone we might capture now or in the future.
My time in war zones have been fleeting and infrequent. I've been to Iraq. I've been to Afghanistan. I've been to other places where I've collected hazardous duty pay.
Chairman Chaffetz was an enthusiastic supporter of the 'USA Freedom Act,' designed to rein in the allegedly renegade NSA and its wanton depredations of American privacy.
Counterterrorism, counterproliferation, and counterintelligence are staples. The four countries of highest interest - Russia, China, Iran and North Korea - are constants.