Classified Information Quotes

I had traveled to Russia and met with Snowden, which was a pretty involved meeting that required encrypted communication and the like. And it was fascinating because of who he is and what he's done. And more so because what's going on between our two countries, Russia and the U.S., and to meet Edward Snowden in Russia was unforgettable.

The most important publication of WikiLeaks is that it has published more than 10 million documents. The most important single collection of material we have published is the US diplomatic cable series. We started with 251,000 in 2011, but are up to 3 million now and have more coming.

I've forgotten more about national security than George W. Bush will ever learn.

Any information about U.S. special operations forces is highly sensitive.

Edward Snowden: The Whistleblower Behind the NSA Surveillance Revelations

For his own vindictive purposes, Jeffrey Sterling carelessly disclosed extremely valuable, highly classified information that he had taken an oath to keep secret.

I'm a spy. It's not really... I worked for the CIA 15 years. The cover was I worked for the insurance business.

Our foreign intelligence was little more than what a military attache could learn at dinner.

The necessity of procuring good Intelligence is apparent & need not be further urged-All that remains for me to add, is, that you keep the whole matter as secret as possible. For upon Secrecy, Success depends in most Enterprizes of the kind, and for want of it, they are generally defeated, however well planned & promising a favourable issue.

I don't welcome leaks. There's a reason why these programs are classified.

The president and the executive branch are always going to have greater latitude and greater authority when it comes to protecting America because sometimes you just have to respond quickly and not everything that is a danger can be publicized and be subject to open debate, but there have to be some guardrails.

I had top-secret clearance and everything. I was working on a couple of projects that would keep me involved in Desert Storm. I was in the mix, which is scary.

Some things simply cannot leak. And if they do leak, the government has to do something about it.

I've spent a lot of time working on declassified documents - and they do get declassified after decades - you look at the record of declassified documents, and they are mostly concerned with keeping what the government does secret from its own population. It's mostly defense of the power system from its own population. Very little is authentic security.

The problem is the myths of Area 51 are hard to dispute if no one can speak on the record about what actually happened there.

Hillary Clinton is a corrupt career politician who has recklessly handled classified information in an attempt to avoid accountability and put American lives at risk, including those of my former colleagues. She fails the basic tests of judgment and ethics any candidate for president must meet.

National security is a serious matter and I do not think it is in proper to discuss such details in a public forum.

To understand how black projects began, and how they continue to function today, one must start with the creation of the atomic bomb. The men who ran the Manhattan Project wrote the rules about black operations. The atomic bomb was the mother of all black projects, and it is the parent from which all black operations have sprung.

Most of what is done I think is to kept secret so the public won't know. The same is true of what Wikileaks exposed.

One of the things that distinguishes the CIA from the State Department is that the CIA is both asked to, and authorized to, steal secrets. So if the question is whether the CIA steals secrets, the answer is yes.

It's interesting in this day and age to do a film about political espionage and wiretapping. I don't think that those types of secrets that J. Edgar Hoover was able to obtain and keep for such a long period of time would be possible in today's world, with the Internet and WikiLeaks.

Government want to tell you things you can't say because they're against the law, or you can't say this because it's against a regulation, or here's something you can't say because its a... secret; "You can't tell him that because he's not cleared to know that." Government wants to control information and control language because that's the way you control thought, and basically that's the game they're in.

[Chelsea] Manning leaked more than 700,000 classified files and videos to WikiLeaks about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and U.S. foreign policy.

The United States is the only country in the world that has ever released the operations files of its intelligence agency.

When the Vice President of the United States shoots somebody, the public has the right to know.