James R. Clapper Quotes

The 'conspiracy theorist' is no longer a crazy person with a tinfoil hat, but they are the Edward Snowdens and the WikiLeaks that bring down major institutions and are the catalysts for social change.

My job is to be skeptical: skeptical of people like Edward Snowden and skeptical of the U.S. government.

I feel that Julian Assange came to be both paranoid and self-regarding in ways that ultimately undermined his own mission. And so, the transparency radical became a secret-keeper instead of a secret-leaker. And that, I think, is a big problem.

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.

President Obama and his successors are dependent on the 100,000-plus people inside the American intelligence community - the people Edward Snowden betrayed.

Whatever you think of Edward Snowden, it took bravery to do what he did.

I call people who are covering up NSA crimes traitors.

The way things are supposed to work is that we're supposed to know virtually everything about what they [the government] do: that's why they're called public servants. They're supposed to know virtually nothing about what we do: that's why we're called private individuals.

These megaleaks... They're an important phenomenon, and they're only going to increase.

Secret government programs that pry into people's private affairs are bound up with ideas about secrecy and privacy that arose during the process by which the mysterious became secular.

Some say Edward Snowden is a hero and a patriot. Others say he's a fool and a traitor. The evidence is mounting that the guy who leaked the details about the National Security Agency's Internet-eavesdropping program may be something more sinister - namely, a willing tool in China's ongoing cyberwar against our nation.

Privacy is tremendously important. I believe the American people, and all people, should be skeptical of government power, should ask hard questions: What is the authority? What is the oversight? That's the way it ought to be.

I have nothing to hide!

I think in some ways what Snowden is, is he's a mix of a cold war spy novel and post-9/11 spy novel.

I am not trying to bring down the NSA, I am working to improve the NSA. I am still working for the NSA right now. They are the only ones who don't realize it.

Cablegate is 3,000 volumes of material. It is the greatest intellectual treasure to have entered into the public record in modern times.

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 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.

There is a culture of secrecy. Nobody gets punished for over-classifying. They might be punished for under-classifying.

An obsession with secrecy persists in leading industrial countries.

National security is the fig leaf against freedom of information.

Bureaucracy always seeks the path of least disclosure.

We don’t have to choose between preserving privacy and preventing terrorism. We do have to decide how much oversight and accountability there should be when the government conducts surveillance on its citizens.

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

Instead of focusing on Snowden and shooting the messenger, we should really focus on the crimes of the NSA [National Security Agency]. Whatever laws Snowden may or may not have broken, they are infinitesimally small compared to the two major surveillance laws and the 4th Amendment to the Constitution that the NSA violated.