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" To be perfectly candid, we're better at stealing other people's secrets than anyone else in the world. But we self-limit. We steal secrets to keep our citizens free and safe. "

Michael Hayden

World

People

Free

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

Michael Hayden

Use

Work

" 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. "

" ThinThread was not the program of record of my predecessor, Ken Minihan, OK. I did not make ThinThread the program of record while I was director. After I left in 2005, Keith Alexander also chose not to make ThinThread the program of record. "

Michael Hayden

Did

Record

" I blame the Russians for a lot, but pinning the creation of ISIS on them is a murky, tenuous, triple-carom bank shot at best. "

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

Michael Hayden

Control

Country

" I enjoyed writing in school. I don't know that I was all that good at it in school. I worked at it later. I feel comfortable writing now. I enjoy writing now. I suspect, like most college students, I viewed writing then to be more tedious. "

" President Obama and his successors are dependent on the 100,000-plus people inside the American intelligence community - the people Edward Snowden betrayed. "

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

" '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. "

" 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. "

" At the end of the 30 Years War then, Europe broadly decided to separate the sacred from the secular in its political culture. I know that is an oversimplification, but it is instructive, and it led to a growth in religious tolerance that has characterized the best of Western life since. "

" Our nation counts on us to have the expertise and the insight to flag the risks and the opportunities that lie ahead, and to keep our eye on all the critical international concerns that face our nation right now. "

" 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. "

" Presidents get to decide how their intelligence is served up to them, and it's the job of intelligence to adjust. "

Michael Hayden

Adjust

Decide

" 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.' "

" If we are going to conduct espionage in the future, we are going to have to make some changes in the relationship between the intelligence community and the public it serves. "

" 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. "

" Before he played CIA Director Saul Berenson on 'Homeland,' a much younger Mandy Patinkin gained some fame as Inigo Montoya, a legendary swordsman, in 'The Princess Bride.' "

" Most of the 9/11 hijackers weren't married, none of them had families inside the United States, and there's no evidence that any family members moved before, during, or after 9/11. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Politicization - the shading of analysis to fit prevailing policy or politics - is the harshest criticism one can make of an intelligence organization. It strikes beyond questions of competence to the fundamental ethic of the enterprise, which is, or should be, truth telling. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Apple and Google want to create encryption for which they could not provide you the key. Their business model will not survive if the American government has a special relationship with them that requires them to surrender this kind of information. "

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

" When the intelligence is making a policymaker too happy, he ought to challenge it, and even if he doesn't, the intelligence briefer needs to launch a red team against his own conclusions to see if he can hold his ground. "