Foreign Agents Quotes

The Tunisian blogger and activist Sami Ben Gharbia has written passionately about how U.S. government involvement in grassroots digital spaces can endanger those who are already vulnerable to accusations by nasty regimes of acting as foreign agents.

This is not a case about one isolated iPhone. Rather, this case is about the Department of Justice and the FBI seeking through the courts a dangerous power that Congress and the American people have withheld: the ability to force companies like Apple to undermine the basic security and privacy interests of hundreds of millions of individuals around the globe. The government demands that Apple create a back door to defeat the encryption on the iPhone, making its user’s most confidential and personal information vulnerable to hackers, identify thieves, hostile foreign agents, and unwarranted government surveillance.

The aim of a foreign intelligence service is to find and convince individuals to help them achieve intelligence objectives.

Israelis cannot enter Iran, so Israel, Iranian officials believe, has devoted huge resources to recruiting Iranians who leave the country on business trips and turning them into agents.

I think what we're learning with the Trump Jr. meeting is when you meet with any Russians, you're meeting with Russian intelligence. And, therefore, President Putin.

So there is a foreign intelligence purpose for every one of our FISA warrants.

Rather than trying to find evidence of a crime, the FBI's counterintelligence goal is to identify, monitor and neutralize foreign intelligence activity in the United States.

There was a mentality in Congress that regarded foreign agents who had committed human rights abuses as unacceptable. The government was too quick to take them off its payrolls, limiting its access to terrorists. It’s that kind of political correctness that you can’t afford in the intelligence business.

Foreign agents are taking advantage of loopholes in our laws.

The President being the only channel of communication between this country and foreign nations, it is from him alone that foreign nations or their agents are to learn what is or has been the will of the nation....

Through knowledge and understanding we will drive from the temple of freedom all who seek to establish over us thought control - whether they be agents of a foreign power or demagogues thirsty for personal power and public notice.

As a former F.B.I. special agent who conducted counterintelligence investigations, I can attest that foreign intelligence services do not operate on the basis of explicit agreements or even actions that, standing alone, constitute criminal activity.

I don't pay a lot of attention to communist infiltrators.

Those who want to 'drain the swamp,' should be praising Mueller for enforcing FARA violations and, in return, prompting more lobbyists to register as foreign agents when required.

Immigration risks infiltration by influences subversive of the American way of life.

This week the Obama administration warned China to remove its secret agents from the U.S. Then in the middle of Obama's announcement a plant behind him got up and walked away.

Counterintelligence is, in effect, chasing ghosts, which is why the tools used to investigate foreign intelligence activity are secret, like human sources or electronic surveillance.

A figure who receives money from abroad for his political work, and thus serves some foreign interest, cannot be a politician in Russia.

There are more foreign intelligence officers inside the US now, working against US interests, than there were at the height of the cold war.

Having conducted counterintelligence investigations, I can attest that not everything a foreign intelligence service does is necessarily illegal.

The Trump administration's assault against the FBI's efforts to assess a national security threat posed by suspected foreign agents only raises more questions about what went on in 2016.

There are Russian spies here now. And if we're lucky, they'll steal some of our secrets and they'll be two years behind.

To be clear, we do not open investigations based on race, or ethnicity, or national origin. But when we open investigations into economic espionage, time and time again, they keep leading back to China.

Henry Ford has also done in many respects enormous damage to the defense of the USA by promoting German-schemes newspapers and pro-German spies with lots of money

With hacking getting more and more sophisticated, the hacking community has gone from the hobbyist in the basement to huge sophisticated companies that are essentially doing this, or groups of people or foreign agents inside and outside the United States.