Valerie Plame Quotes

An obsession with secrecy persists in leading industrial countries.

I don't see anything that's come out on WikiLeaks that was a legitimate secret.

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.

I thought it was a classic David and Goliath story, and I was fully onboard Team WikiLeaks. I was very pro the leaks, barring the redaction issue. But I see WikiLeaks as a publisher.

In real danger sometimes even a democracy can really keep a secret.

In the history of Wikileaks, nobody has claimed that the material being put out is not authentic.

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.

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

Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, has on several occasions talked about transparency as an absolute principle. I don't personally believe that.

Most of the secrets the CIA has are about people, not machines and systems, so I didn't feel comfortable with disclosures that I thought could endanger anyone.

Federal prosecutors want to indict Julian Assange for making public a great many classified documents.

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.

WikiLeaks presents a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States.

The Obama administration does not hate unauthorized leaks of classified information. They are more responsible for such leaks than anyone. What they hate are leaks that embarrass them or expose their wrongdoing. Those are the only kinds of leaks that are prosecuted.

But the Congress has made the determination that certain kinds of information can be protected even though the American people may want to have access to information.

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

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

National security is the fig leaf against freedom of information.

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

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

If you are completely transparent, then you have no intelligence service.

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.

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

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

The Official Secrets Act 1989 may need reforming for the digital era, but I would argue that at its heart there should be protection for whistleblowers.