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" The use of these techniques against these terrorists made us safer. It really did work. "

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

" The Constitution defends all of us against unreasonable search and seizure. What constitutes reasonableness depends upon threat. "

" Dissenting analysts passionate about their positions are not unusual in the American intelligence community. Their presence - or even the rejection - of their favored positions is not prima face evidence of politicization. "

" There's still a lot of things you can legitimately do to make America safe through electronic surveillance. "

" Counterterrorism, counterproliferation, and counterintelligence are staples. The four countries of highest interest - Russia, China, Iran and North Korea - are constants. "

" '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. "

" I think the Sino-American relationship is the most important geo-strategic question facing us. "

" Once you're in a network, you can do a whole bunch of things to that network. It's just that NSA doesn't have the authority to do that. "

" Right after 9/11, I mean, every agency can give their own gradation, but a nice, popular rule of thumb is everybody doubled down. I ended up in NSA with about twice as much money as I had prior to 9/11. "

" Great weight should be given to the judgment of professionals on what information, if disclosed, would harm national security. "

" George Tenet was actually a very strong centralizing force. If you met George by personality, George met with the president six days out of seven: nontrivial attribute inside the federal government. And George was head of the CIA. "

" There is no worse place for an intelligence service like CIA to be than on Page 1, above the fold in your daily newspaper. "

" My experience has been that military assessments on 'how goes the war' are consistently more optimistic than those made by the CIA and other agencies. "

" I used to have a little saying I used when people said, 'What are your priorities?' I'd give them a bit of government alphabet soup. I'd say 'CTCPROW: Counterterrorism, counterproliferation, rest of the world.' "

" People have a right to privacy, but they also have a right to live. Fundamentally, we need cybersecurity and need to secure communications as well. "

" I was an intelligence officer for what was then 8th Air Force, B-52 Air Force. "

" 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. "

" Thoreau points out clearly that civil disobedience gets its moral authority by the willingness to suffer the penalties from disobeying a law, even if you think that law is unjust. "

" 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. "

" I'm not hugging the Guantanamo location, but our right to hold people under the laws of war as enemy combatants, I think, is unarguable, and we need to stand up for that. "

" 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. "

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

" There is an unarguable downside to unbreakable encryption. "

" NSA is a very conservative culture legally. Our lawyers at NSA were notorious for their conservatism up through the morning of September 11th, 2001. The single most consistent criticism of the NSA legal office by our congressional oversight committee was that our legal office was too conservative. "

" The CIA held about a hundred detainees from 2002 to 2008; about a third of them underwent interrogations that have been variously described as enhanced, tough or torture. The toughest technique was water boarding, used on three detainees, the last in early 2003. "

" One might oppose the CIA program, but Abu Ghraib it ain't. "

" When I was at the CIA I asked my civilian advisory board to tackle some tough questions. Among the toughest: In a political culture that every day demands more transparency and more public accountability from every aspect of national life, could American intelligence continue to survive and succeed? That jury is still out. "

" 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. "

" When asked if I miss being in government, I usually try to lighten the moment by responding that I awake most days, read the paper, and then observe that, 'It's yet another great day to be the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency.' "

" CIA relies on a partner's focus, linguistic agility, and cultural depth; in return, the partner benefits from CIA's resources, technology, and global view. "