Nsa quotes
187 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"You wonder why your government's completely broken? We lurch from deadline to deadline, and it's on purpose really. We do deadline to deadline because ... 'we've got to go. It's spring break, we're going to be late for spring break, and we've got to go, so we've got to finish this up before we go.'"
"Any time you make an analogy to horrific people in history, Mussolini or Hitler, people say, 'Oh, you're exaggerating, you're talking about, it's hyperbole.' Maybe it is. ... But I would say is that if you are not concerned that democracy could produce bad people, I don't think you're really thinking this through too much."
"The challenges posed by threats like terrorism, proliferation, and cyber attacks are not going away any time soon, and for our intelligence community to be effective over the long haul, we must maintain the trust of the American people and people around the world."
"What is portrayed as high-minded positions on issues sometimes is just designed to carve out some of their commercial interests."
"My relationship with Silicon Valley and the tech community historically has been really good. Many of these folks are my friends."
"I wouldn't consider them acts of war, but I would consider them acts of property damage, commercial theft that are serious."
"I don't welcome leaks. There's a reason why these programs are classified."
"One of the things we're going to have to discuss and debate is how are we striking this balance between the need to keep the American people safe and our concerns about privacy. Because there are some trade-offs involved. I welcome this debate, and I think it's healthy for our democracy."
"When it comes to telephone calls, nobody is listening to your telephone calls. That's not what this program is about. ... What the intelligence community is doing is looking at phone numbers, and durations of calls; they are not looking at people's names and they're not looking at content. ... If the intelligence committee actually wants to listen to a phone call they have to go back to a federal judge, just like they would in a criminal investigation."
"So I think it's important to understand that your duly elected representatives have been consistently informed about exactly what we're doing."
"The programs that have been discussed over the last couple days in the press are secret in the sense that they are classified but they are not secret in the sense that when it comes to phone calls every member of Congress has been briefed on this program. With respect to all these programs the relevant intelligence committees are fully briefed on these programs. These are programs that have been authorized by broad bipartisan majorities repeatedly since 2006."
"Granting such immunity undermines the constitutional protections Americans trust the Congress to protect."
"We need to find a way forward to make sure that we can stop terrorists while protecting the privacy, and liberty, of innocent Americans."
"There is an obligation both moral, but also legal, I believe, against a reporter disclosing something which would so severely compromise national security."
"The president should stop apologizing, stop being defensive. The reality is the NSA has saved thousands of lives not just in the United States but in France, Germany and throughout Europe."
"Congress must go further to protect the right to privacy, to end the NSA's dragnet surveillance of ordinary Americans, to make the intelligence community more transparent and accountable."
"The NSA's business is 'information dominance,' the use of other people's secrets to shape events."
"I think we've made the collection haystack so big, no one's ever getting through the haystack to find the needle. What we really need to do is isolate the haystack into a group of suspicious people and spend enormous resources looking at suspicious people, people who we have probable cause."
"Some in Washington say that you have to trade your liberty for security."
"The president began this program by executive order. He should immediately end it by executive order. For over a year now, he has said the program is illegal, and yet he does nothing."
