Jeremy Pope Quotes

No less a philosopher than Chief Justice Burger was outraged by Ellsberg's publication of classified documents. They belonged to the Government, Burger reasoned, and Ellsberg had no more right to give them to the people than he would have to filch another man's property off a taxicab seat. The Government, of course, commonly leaks classified documents when it deems publication convenient to manipulate public opinion to its advantage. Only the Government, it seems, has a legal right to manipulate opinion with hot documents.

Some things simply cannot leak. And if they do leak, the government has to do something about it.

The law does not distinguish terribly well between real secrets and sort-of secrets, especially in an age when the instinct to stamp “classified” runs rampant.

Regarding Wikileaks, I have profound ambivalent feelings about it. I am a firm believer in a strong intelligence service. There's a need for classified information.

It is up to the government to keep the government's secrets.

The secrecy stamp … has been used to withhold information which in 99 ½ percent of the cases would present no danger to national security.

We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things the general public does not need to know, and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows

There is a culture of secrecy. Nobody gets punished for over-classifying. They might be punished for under-classifying.

We live in the most wide open society the world has ever known….We need to have fewer secrets and a rational classification policy.

National security is the fig leaf against freedom of information.

The United States is the only country in the world that has ever released the operations files of its intelligence agency.

Some information has to remain in the privy of the office of the Prime Minister and the ministers for the proper administration of government.

Bureaucracy always seeks the path of least disclosure.

Our agency (the Central Intelligence Agency) is the last refuge of organizational privacy available to the U. S. Government.

Under the classification rules observed by the Senate, we are not even allowed to tap out the truth in Morse code—and we tried just about everything else we could think of to warn the American people.

Governments want to control information. To do this, they have elaborate systems for promoting themselves via propaganda departments and for ensuring confidentiality with official-secrets laws. There are good reasons for these: people need information, and national security deserves secrecy.

The U.K. government has a responsibility to keep secrets in some circumstances. It also has a responsibility not to abuse that power for other purposes.

It's increasingly clear that governments, major corporations, banks, universities and other such bodies view the defense of their secrets as a desperate matter of institutional survival, so much so that the state has gone to extraordinary lengths to punish and/or threaten to punish anyone who so much as tiptoes across the informational line.

People will never know how hard it is to get information, especially if it's locked up behind official doors where, if politicians had their way, they'd stamp 'top secret' on the color of the walls.

Federal prosecutors want to indict Julian Assange for making public a great many classified documents.

In real danger sometimes even a democracy can really keep a secret.

Leaks are not the problem; they are the symptom. They reveal a disconnect between what people want and need to know and what they actually do know. The greater the secrecy, the more likely a leak.

Classification is used, not to protect the national interest but to prevent national embarrassment.

The National Security Agency plays so highly specialized a role in the defense and security of the United States that an outsider can actually describe its activities. They are guarded not only from the public but from other government agencies as well. The Civil Service Commission, which audits all government positions, is not allowed to know what NSA employees do.

[Defining state secrets:] All state affairs which have not yet been decided upon, or which have been decided upon but not yet been made public.