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" 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. "

Michael Hayden

Intelligence

Day

Culture

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

Michael Hayden

Control

Country

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" Accusations fit on a bumper sticker; the truth takes longer. "

" 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. "

" Global security can be formed or threatened by heads of state whose wisdom, folly and obsessions shape global events. But often it is the security practitioners, those rarely in the headlines but whose craft and energy quietly break new ground, who keep us safe or put us in peril. "

" '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. "

" 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. "

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

" What Edward Snowden did amounted to the greatest hemorrhaging of legitimate American secrets in the history of my nation. "

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

" President Obama came to office with a strong belief that America had overreached, that we had become too involved. It matched the national mood, and indeed, there was some evidence that it was true. "

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

Michael Hayden

Citizens

Nothing

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" There is an unarguable downside to unbreakable encryption. "

Michael Hayden

Encryption

Downside

" There's this movie, 'Zero Dark Thirty' about the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Some have complained that too many 'secrets' were dished out by the intelligence and special operations communities to director Kathryn Bigelow, screenwriter Mark Boal and their crew, part of a broader pattern of using intelligence for political effect. "

" My literal responsibility as director of the CIA with regard to covert action was to inform the Congress - not to seek their approval; to inform. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" The arc of technology is in the direction of unbreakable encryption, and no laws are going to get in the way of that reality. "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" Intelligence is often viewed as a profession that steals secrets and then knits those secrets together for policymakers in order to inform their judgments. "