Jacob Rees-Mogg Quotes

An obsession with secrecy persists in leading industrial countries.

National security is the fig leaf against freedom of information.

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.

What's public is propaganda, what's secret is serious.

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

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.

My father was in the army, and you know not to talk about things on the telephone that you wouldn't want to hear transmitted.

It is not true that virtually all news in a totalitarian state is false.

Most of the press is in league with government, or with the status quo.

History is rife with examples of governments taking actions to 'protect' their citizens from harm by controlling access to information and inhibiting freedom of expression and other freedoms outlined in The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We must make sure, collectively, that the Internet avoids a similar fate.

Televisions and radios are locked on government frequencies - it is a serious crime to listen to a foreign broadcast. As a result, North Koreans think that they live in the best country in the world and that, as difficult as their lives may be, everybody else has it much worse.

Censorship is advertising paid by the government.

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.

And in the Second World War, you didn't just read about it in the newspapers because you weren't allowed to read it in the newspapers. It was all censored, you know? So nobody knew what we were doing.

If the American President had control of the media, his job would be much easier.

A threat to national security which has to be silenced

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

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.

Censorship is being abused as a cloak to cover all political, naval and military mistakes..

Even a government as ostensibly open and committed to freedom of speech as our own — are [censors] more likely to operate in their own interests than in their citizens’. In the age of cyberspace, that is a scary prospect.

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

The fight is not over what shall be secret, but over who shall determine what shall be secret.

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.

Social media companies like Twitter and Facebook get to decide whether or not you get pertinent information about national security issues in your country.