John Jay Quotes

Everything the CIA does is secret and it is secret particularly from the Congress.

If there's a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is.

You can’t have Congressional hearings on classified matters.

Secrecy is essential to committee deliberations because members would be wary of exploring ideas or exchanging views if there were a substantial possibility of an embarrassing leak.

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

There has been no more significant disclosure in the history of our country. And I’ll include the Pentagon Papers in that.

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

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

If we cannot keep secrets, it is impossible for our leaders to have the adequate information on which to base their policies.

If we really care about safety we would close down WikiLeaks. We would treat the people at WikiLeaks as enemy combatants. We would declare that the kind of thing this private did is treason. WikiLeaks is not a fun and games event. WikiLeaks undermines profoundly the ability of the United States to work around the world. Why would you, if you were a foreigner thinking about helping the United States, why would you confide anything to an American when you know that it could end up in The New York Times based on some leak?

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.

There should be at least one leak like the Pentagon Papers every year.

The fact is that when it comes to judgment as to what should be secret and what should not be secret, Julian Assange's judgment has been pretty good so far.

If the president is failing to disclose material facts with regard to legislation being presented to the Congress on a question as important as war and peace, I think it does impair the level of trust that the House and the Senate have for this administration.

Secrecy is the first essential in affairs of state.

When people ask me if I have worked for the C.I.A., I often answer: what good to you is my answer? Because if I did, I might not say so.

An urgent need exists for regular and responsible Congressional scrutiny of the Central Intelligence Agency. Such scrutiny is essential… Our form of government…is based on a system of checks and balances. If this system gets seriously out of balance at any point the whole system is jeopardized and the way is opened for the growth of tyranny…CIA is freed from practically every ordinary form of Congressional check. I agree that an intelligence agency must maintain complete secrecy to be effective. However, there is a profound difference between an essential degree of secrecy to achieve a specific purpose and secrecy for the mere sake of secrecy.

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.

The U. S. press has become a major source of unauthorized intelligence information. Classified information disclosed in the press is the equivalent of information obtained by enemy espionage.

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

If there's more than one person—including yourself—in a room, consider anything said to be on the record and a probable headline in the morning paper.

An obsession with secrecy persists in leading industrial countries.

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.

We will just have to tell the House that they will have to accept our judgment and we cannot answer a great many questions that might be asked

If you are completely transparent, then you have no intelligence service.