Rachel Maddow Quotes

Can the public business be thus transacted and in secret?

I think there's been a decline in the public's access to what's being done with their tax dollars, what's being done in their name. I hope that that will be repaired.

Secrecy in government, in the public mind, becomes synonymous with deception in government.

I believe that the American People have a right to know what was done in their name..

Independence sounds good in theory, but in practice, it is mutually exclusive with accountability. The more independence you give a prosecutor, the less you make that prosecutor accountable to the public and regular checks and balances.

If we cannot share aspects of our secret work with the public, we should do so with their elected representatives. For CIA oversight is a vital link to the open society we defend. It's a defining feature of the U.S. intelligence community and one of the many things that distinguishes us from the hostile services we face in the field.

Our public officials have forgotten that they are ultimately accountable to the people who put them in office, that the information they keep in secrecy belongs to all of us.

All officers of the Intelligence Community, and especially its most senior officer, must conduct themselves in a manner that earns and retains the public trust. The American people are uncomfortable with government activities that do not take place in the open, subject to public scrutiny and review.

If governments did not mislead their citizens so often, there would be less need for secrecy, and if leaders knew they could not rely on keeping the public in the dark about what they are doing, they would have a powerful incentive to behave better.

National security laws must protect national security. But they must also protect the public trust and preserve the ability of an informed electorate to hold its government to account.

The Senate must stop doing so much of its business in secret, behind closed doors…. A bill that affects the nation’s security has been held up for months by a secret hold and cannot see the light of day…. There is no accountability…. The person who exercises a hold ought to be identified…. Secret holds have been the bane of the United States Senate for decades. So much for sunshine in the United States Senate.

Even more shocking is a proposal to create a new biodefense research agency that would be completely exempt from FOIA ...We can all agree that the nation must prepare, but it should not do so in abject secrecy

You can’t have Congressional hearings on classified matters.

When the Vice President of the United States shoots somebody, the public has the right to know.

The CIA claims that secrecy is necessary to hide what it's doing from enemies of the United States ... the real reason for secrecy is to hide what the CIA is doing from the American people.

The people have a right to know—no, a duty to know—what the army is doing in our name.

I find it extremely difficult to argue against telling the people of the United States how much we intend to spend on the aggregate for intelligence purposes.

Our government cannot function cloaked in secrecy. It cannot function unless officials tell the truth.

Americans have a right to know what is being done in their name…. These cables tell the unvarnished story of how the government makes its biggest decisions.

Secrecy is an instrument of conspiracy; it ought not, therefore, to be the system of a regular government

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

The problem is that the American public is suspicious of executive power shrouded in secrecy. In the absence of an official picture of what our government is doing, and by what authority, many in the public fill the void by envisioning the worst.

In order to maintain public trust in government, elected officials must answer for what they do and say; this includes 140-character tweets.

Congressional overseers and the public must be given appropriate insight into government activities as well as their legal rationale to ensure America's values are being upheld and our interests advanced.

Americans can tolerate some secrecy, particularly when it is rooted in protection of the public's interests. But when the claims appear to hide wrongdoing, they begin to curdle.