Stuart Symington Quotes

But the Congress has made the determination that certain kinds of information can be protected even though the American people may want to have access to information.

The U.K. government has a responsibility to keep secrets in some circumstances. It also has a responsibility not to abuse that power for other purposes.

The law does not distinguish terribly well between real secrets and sort-of secrets, especially in an age when the instinct to stamp “classified” runs rampant.

We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things the general public does not need to know, and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows

Most leaks from large bureaucracies are “good” leaks: no danger to national security, no harm to innocent people, information the public ought to know.

Regarding Wikileaks, I have profound ambivalent feelings about it. I am a firm believer in a strong intelligence service. There's a need for classified information.

There are some episodes in the history of Israel that are still kept under the strongest secrecy thick veil possible. Some of them are 40 years old, 50 years old, and are still under thick, thick secrecy, and anyone violating this secrecy would be thrown into jail himself.

We don't have an Official Secrets Act in the United States, as other countries do. Under the First Amendment, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and freedom of association are more important than protecting secrets.

Henry Kissinger never wanted the 20,000 pages of his telephone transcripts made public - not while he was alive, at any rate.

It is up to the government to keep the government's secrets.

There are, for example, exemptions in FOIA in which the government can withhold certain kinds of information, and the courts have recognized that there is certain documentation that do deserve protection, that certain privileges do apply and do deserve protection.

The very word 'secrecy' is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths, and to secret proceedings.

The American people have been denied important information for their own protection.

You can’t have Congressional hearings on classified matters.

The secrecy stamp … has been used to withhold information which in 99 ½ percent of the cases would present no danger to national security.

The present trend toward Government secrecy could end in a dictatorship. The more information there is made available, the greater will be the nation’s security.

An obsession with secrecy persists in leading industrial countries.

National security is the fig leaf against freedom of information.

In a democracy threatened by excessive secrecy and the criminalizing of news gathering, the more sunlight the better.

It is not unusual to see intelligence agencies classify newspaper clippings as secret even after they have been published. The reason is that the agency people can then avoid answering questions about a matter that the do not want to publicly dicuss by sayting that the subject is classified and they are not allowed to discuss it.

There is no plausible theory under which the record of the Pentagon Papers can be interpreted as relating to the national defense.

Our constitutional system is defined by a balance between the public's need for transparency and the government's need to have a zone of secrecy around decision making. Both are important, yet they are mutually exclusive.

The Official Secrets Act 1989 may need reforming for the digital era, but I would argue that at its heart there should be protection for whistleblowers.

It is my experience that most claims of national security are part of a campaign to avoid telling the truth.

Accountability is the essence of democracy. If people do not know what their government is doing, they cannot be truly self-governing. The national security state assumes the government secrets are too important to be shared, that only those in the know can see classified information, that only the president has all the facts, that we must simply trust that our rulers of acting in our interest.