Masao Miyamoto Quotes

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

Bureaucracy always seeks the path of least disclosure.

Most leaks from large bureaucracies are “good” leaks: no danger to national security, no harm to innocent people, information the public ought to know.

No one really knows how many [SBU] records are covered or for how long, and there are practically none of the limits that we do have in the security classification world.

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.

It is sometimes necessary to keep matters secret among a few.

Some things are not best done in public even though the public is asking for a confrontation.

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

I have no particular formula for staying private.

I guard my privacy zealously.

I've always retained my privacy, but now I protect it even more.

Oh, well, there's a difference between privacy and secrecy.

I think privacy is valuable. You don't have to share everything, and it's healthy to occasionally hit the pause button and ask yourself if you're oversharing. But at the end of the day, if you're not doing anything wrong, you don't have anything to hide.

People have given me classified information, but always with the disclaimer 'This can never end up in a book.' And it never does.

I really fight for my privacy.

I have nothing to hide!

I would never jeopardize classified information to be brought out to the public. This information is all open source. There is no reason to worry about classification. It is simply an attempt by bureaucrats to cover their rear ends.

The people have the right to know what their Agents are doing or have done, and it should not be in the option of the Legislature to conceal their proceedings.

Leaks usually have more value to the public at large than the harm which they occasionally do.

How did we come to this: a Kafkaesque world where information that is in the public domain can be retroactively declared secret.

In the Eisenhower days, for example, the "Top Secret" stamp was used very, very freely in order not to conceal information from the Soviets or from potential enemies, but simply to conceal it from the U.S. people and from the press. This is done again and again.

An obsession with secrecy persists in leading industrial countries.

Nothing on paper; paper can be lost or stolen or simply inherited by the wrong people; if you want to keep something secret, don't write it down.

National security is the fig leaf against freedom of information.

All registers which, it is acknowledged, ought to be kept secret, ought certainly never to exist.