Dianne Feinstein Quotes

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

The Secret Intelligence Service I knew occupied dusky suites of little rooms opposite St James's Park Tube station in London.

I wasn't privy to all of the intelligence that was coming in about Guatemala, but I did see the traffic that was coming in from Guatemala City, because it was very relevant to me, and of course I exchanged what I had with the chief of station in Guatemala City.

In order to be successful against each of these threats, we have to have a presence overseas, work closely not only with our counterparts in the law enforcement community, but also with the intelligence community.

There is still much to be done by our intelligence community to bring its achievements up to an acceptable level.

The safety and security of the nation depends more so than ever before on intelligence.

The intelligence community is built, resourced, designed, trained, and focused around secrecy. We try to obtain the secrets of our adversaries and we try and keep secret how we are doing so.

Bureau of Secret Intelligence.

Intelligence is fragmentary and hard to discover, so it is by joining forces and sharing information with our allies that we maximise our ability to protect ourselves.

We need to strengthen our analytic capacity in Washington, we need to centralize the anti-terrorism effort.

SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, also has no executive powers and operates abroad on CIA lines, but with a tiny percentage of the budget and a tiny percentage of the personnel.

The men and women of the CIA are a national treasure.

I've had nothing to do with the intelligence world since I left it, in any shade or variety.

Terrorists and criminals are increasingly adept at exploiting cutting-edge technologies to carry out or to mask their crimes. To counter current and emerging threats, the FBI actively deploys a wide range of technology-based tools, capabilities, and training that enable and enhance intelligence, national security, and law enforcement operations.

Improving our national intelligence capabilities should remain a top priority and a continual process.

I particularly recognize that reasonable people can disagree as to what that proper balance or blend is between privacy and security and safety.

It's necessary to understand what real intelligence work is. It will never cease. It's absolutely essential that we have it. At its best, it is simply the left arm of healthy governmental curiosity. It brings to a strong government what it needs to know. It's the collection of information, a journalistic job, if you will, but done in secret.

An espionage organization is a collector: it collects raw information. That gets processed by a machinery that is supposed to resolve its reliability, and to present a finished product.

It's not that the system is broken, but clearly there are ways to improve the system, strengthen it, to make sure that we can put together the various bits and pieces of information in a way that allows us to stop every single terrorist out there.

For some, the very act of intelligence gathering seems illegitimate when applied to the crime of terrorism.

I wasn't a spy. I'd have been spotted in five seconds. Yes, I was in intelligence, but that covered a multitude of things.

We have to examine very carefully any privacy-reducing technology.

The supply of leaks is very large. It's helpful for us to have more people in this industry. It's protective to us.

Nobody - myself included - believes that we could ever achieve total information awareness. But the government needs to set goals and long-range objectives. Total information awareness is a good goal.

Intelligence is our first line of defense against terrorism, and we must improve the collection capabilities and analysis of intelligence to protect the security of the United States and its allies.