John Brennan Quotes

I am unable to tell a quarter of a billion Americans what we are doing on their behalf, because if I did, it would become the table of contents of the training manual of the enemy.

In intelligence work, there are limits to the amount of information one can share. Confidentiality is essential.

The United States strongly condemns the illegal disclosure of classified information. It puts people's lives in danger, threatens our national security, and undermines our efforts to work with other countries to solve shared problems.

And I understand that, I testified in closed hearings over eight years because there are intelligence matters, there are sensitive matters that should not be held in a public hearing.

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.

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

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

I do not want to respond to leaks that concern things that have to do with state secrets of the first degree.

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

White House leaks of classified information put the lives of U.S. service members, intelligence officers, and civilians at risk. That's why I support a measure passed by the Senate Intelligence Committee to crack down on such leaks.

I worked with people like Edward Snowden. Well, not people who took stuff home.

Everybody has a hacking capability. And probably every intelligence service is hacking in the territory of other countries. But who exactly does what? That would be a very sensitive piece of information. But it's very difficult to communicate about it. Because nobody wants to admit the scope of what they're doing.

Leaking of classified material is a concern.

When you're told to go brief a United States senator on a covert operation, you go do it. And you trust the information isn't going to leak.

There is nobody I know by name who is concerned with collecting information for the Russian authorities. There are people whom I know by sight whom I trusted with my life.

I don't want to talk about intelligence matters. I will say, however, that intelligence-community estimates should not become public in the way of this city and in the way of Congress.

There was a second problem that was still not a technical problem... the project became classified. I couldn't work on it after having gone to all that trouble. I was considered a security risk, so I could not get a clearance.

I wrote 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' at the age of 30 under intense, unshared personal stress and in extreme privacy. As an intelligence officer in the guise of a junior diplomat at the British Embassy in Bonn, I was a secret to my colleagues, and much of the time to myself.

Our plans for 'Superman?' I can't say. This is the most super secret thing ever. It's like working for the government, like I'm on a covert mission.

But the technology was accessible, which suggests incompetence on the part of our counterintelligence community and the Clinton Administration, and may in fact rise to the level of treason.

If you think you might have secret information listening to me, you're lost.

Since real spies are so good, you never really know what actual spying is. But I do think spying is a lot more dangerous than we are led to believe.

In the '60s - and right up to the present day - the identity of a member of the British Secret Services was and is, quite rightly, a state secret. To divulge it is a crime. The Services may choose to leak a name when it pleases them.

We need to make sure that leaks of classified information, of national security secrets, needs to be rigorously pursued and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

The information I received as a member of the National Security Council, in my capacity as Vice—President, was so confidential that I would lose my right arm before I divulge it to anyone, even to members of my own family…