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" Intelligence collection is not confined to the communications of adversaries or of the guilty. Rather, it's about gaining information otherwise unavailable that would help keep Americans safe and free. "

Related Quotes:

" MEMRI counts the federal government as a customer for its analysis, and the MEMRI logo is often visible on the B-roll video of major news networks. Other private firms create their own information rather than tracking that of others. "

Michael Hayden

Information

Create

News

" It's good to remind intelligence producers and consumers alike about the need to 'warn of emerging conditions, trends, threats and opportunities' and the potential for discontinuities. "

" 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. "

" When I was director of the CIA, I knew that we had been - and I'm choosing my words very carefully here - effective in our expansion. We really had - expansion of government agencies and expansion of use of contractors. Effective, we were; efficient, we weren't. And so, as director of the CIA, I went after the inefficiencies part. "

" National security looks different from the Oval Office than it does from a hotel room in Iowa. "

" The problem with cyber weapons for a country like ours is the ability to control them. "

Michael Hayden

Control

Country

" Our inaction created the opportunity for the Russians to reenter the Middle East in a powerful way for the first time since 1973. "

" In the Cold War, a lot of Soviet actions could be explained as extensions of Czarist imperial ambitions, but that didn't stop us from studying Marxism in theory and Communism in practice to better understand that adversary. "

" 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. "

" ISIS is a learning enemy, and former Deputy Director of NSA Chris Inglis says that they have gone to school on the documents released by Edward Snowden and have changed their communications practices. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" For all of its well-deserved reputation for pragmatism, American popular culture frequently nurtures or at least tolerates preposterous views and theories. Witness the 9/11 'truthers' who, lacking any evidence whatsoever, claim that 9/11 was a Bush administration plot. "

" 'End strength' - the total number of government employees you can have at the end of the year. That's a separate exercise and requires independent energy, independent effort with the Congress to get the ceiling of your government employees raised. "

" In my own private-sector work, I have become intrigued with RIWI, a Canadian based company that surveys random respondents on the Web to measure attitudes in otherwise hard-to-reach places. "

" My life experience confirms that the U.S. government frequently overclassifies data. But that's a stronger argument for not dumping large volumes of government traffic on an unclassified personal server than it is a justification for retroactively challenging classification decisions. "

" We're an organization with a clear objective: to protect the American people. We have a number of missions that feed into that, to protect America, and one of those missions we share with the council, which is to help our policymakers make sense of global events. "

" My personal view is that Iran, left to its own devices, will get itself to that step right below a nuclear weapon, that permanent breakout stage, so the needle isn't quite in the red for the international community. And, frankly, that will be as destabilizing as their actually having a weapon. "

" American political elites feel very empowered to criticize the American intelligence community for not doing enough when they feel in danger, and as soon as we've made them feel safe again, they feel equally empowered to complain that we're doing too much. "

" As director of CIA, I was responsible for everything done in the agency's name, and it didn't matter whether that was done by an agency employee, a government contractor, a liaison service on our behalf, or a source on our behalf. "

" Nothing more threatens Vladimir Putin than not being able to track his own citizens. "

Michael Hayden

Citizens

Nothing

" 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. "

" 'Islamist terrorism.' The very phrase is contentious. No one wants to make this problem harder by unfairly branding and alienating a quarter of the world's population, and even in this construction, no one should be thinking this means all of Islam or all Muslims. "

" Responsibility demands action, and dealing with the immediate threat must naturally be a top priority. "

" There is an unarguable downside to unbreakable encryption. "

Michael Hayden

Encryption

Downside

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The FISA Amendment Act of 2008 actually allows some of the things we were doing under the president's authority only against al Qaeda, it allows them for all legitimate foreign intelligence purposes. "

" I've often said that the ISIS-Syria-Iraq mess is about as bad as it could be. "