Glenn Greenwald Quotes

I don't think that any government has a right to subvert the truth or to cover up the truth, and all I see WikiLeaks doing is exposing the truth.

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.

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.

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

I have no doubt that the nation has suffered more from undue secrecy than from undue disclosure. The government takes good care of itself.

WikiLeaks is what happens when the entire U.S. government is forced to go through a full-body scanner.

The U.K. government has a responsibility to keep secrets in some circumstances. It also has a responsibility not to abuse that power for other purposes.

Any unveiling is also veiling. No matter how transparent our governments want to be, governments will be selectively transparent.

There should be at least one leak like the Pentagon Papers every year.

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.

People intrinsically know there are secrets being held from us. Look at WikiLeaks: There are secrets that are really true to the world.

Why does the White House sometimes seem so determined to close the door on the people's right to know what their government is doing?

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

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

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

Can the public business be thus transacted and in secret?

There is nothing secret in our nation’s capital.

The United States is the only country in the world that has ever released the operations files of its intelligence agency.

… a guarantee of public access to government information is indispensable in the long run for any democratic society.... if officials make public only what they want citizens to know, then publicity becomes a sham and accountability meaningless.

The public must know about the general outlines of surveillance activities in order to evaluate whether the government is achieving the appropriate balance between privacy and security.

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

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

We've got to break through the wall of secrecy. It's America's fate.

I've spent a lot of time working on declassified documents - and they do get declassified after decades - you look at the record of declassified documents, and they are mostly concerned with keeping what the government does secret from its own population. It's mostly defense of the power system from its own population. Very little is authentic security.

Secrecy and a free, democratic government don't mix.