Russell Baker Quotes

An obsession with secrecy persists in leading industrial countries.

The law does not distinguish terribly well between real secrets and sort-of secrets, especially in an age when the instinct to stamp “classified” runs rampant.

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

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.

Leaks usually have more value to the public at large than the harm which they occasionally do.

We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things the general public does not need to know, and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows

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

Bureaucracy always seeks the path of least disclosure.

There has been no more significant disclosure in the history of our country. And I’ll include the Pentagon Papers in that.

In China, there is a long history of the government not revealing information, so it’s difficult for the Chinese people to ever know the truth. It is vital that we try to bring that truth to life.

The Snowden leaks were important – a legitimate scoop – and we might never have known about the NSA’s law breaking if it had not been for them.

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

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.

It is hard to imagine having a government more secretive than the United States. Virtually everything that government does, of any significance, is conducted behind an extreme wall of secrecy. The very few leaks that we’ve had over the last decade are basically the only ways that we’ve had to learn what our government is doing.

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

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

It is up to the government to keep the government's secrets.

The fact is that when it comes to judgment as to what should be secret and what should not be secret, Julian Assange's judgment has been pretty good so far.

In the Pentagon Papers case, the government asserted in the Supreme Court that the publication of the material was a threat to national security. It turned out it was not a threat to U.S. security. But even if it had been, that doesn't mean that it couldn't be published.

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

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.

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

The present trend toward Government secrecy could end in a dictatorship. The more information there is made available, the greater will be the nation’s security.

In the Eisenhower days, for example, the "Top Secret" stamp was used very, very freely in order not to conceal information from the Soviets or from potential enemies, but simply to conceal it from the U.S. people and from the press. This is done again and again.