Jack Cafferty Quotes

I wanted to choose somewhere public, because I was scared of the KGB.

The NSA's business is 'information dominance,' the use of other people's secrets to shape events.

… J. Edgar Hoover, whom you should trust as much as you would a rattlesnake with a silencer on its rattle.

You can't run a government that is leaking all over the place.

] The vast industry of mutual surveillance that grew up alongside the industry of mutual destruction is not about to disappear. The spies, like the weapons, are here to stay. And proliferate, sooner or later, whether we like it or not.

Americans don’t spy on Americans.

I was … struck with their [the British] attention to SECRECY in all their operations. I was confined upon parole to the district where our wounded lay, and when the whole army marched by my lodgings I was confined by an officer to a back room. They lock up the houses of every family that is suspected of being in the least unfriendly to them in their marches thro' the country, & if they are discovered by a countryman whom they suspect, they force him to accompany the army 'till their route or disposition are so far changed that no mischief can arise from the intelligence he is able to convey.

Homeland security intelligence done the wrong way will give us thought police.

Secrecy at the level of the individual suspect is different from keeping the very existence of massive surveillance programs secret.

The message to the NSA is coming from every branch of our government, from every corner of our nation. NSA, you’ve gone too far!

The intelligence agencies sometimes abuse people. The FBI abused Martin Luther King.

Just the minute the FBI begins making recommendations on what should be done with its information, it becomes a Gestapo.

Since real spies are so good, you never really know what actual spying is. But I do think spying is a lot more dangerous than we are led to believe.

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.

Too many people have been spied upon by too many Government agencies and too much information has been collected. The Government has often undertaken the secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power. The Government, operating primarily through secret informants, but also using other intrusive techniques such as wiretaps, microphone "bugs", surreptitious mail opening, and break-ins, has swept in vast amounts of information about the personal lives, views, and associations of American citizens. Investigations of groups deemed potentially dangerous -- and even of groups suspected of associating with potentially dangerous organizations -- have continued for decades, despite the fact that those groups did not engage in unlawful activity. Groups and individuals have been harassed and disrupted because of their political views and their lifestyles. Investigations have been based upon vague standards whose breadth made excessive collection inevitable.

National security is like that vague term Executive privilege. Both terms have been abused; both concepts have been damaged; they've been used as shields for secrecy.

It appears to the American people that the government is intent on prying into every nook and cranny of people’s private lives, while at the same time doing all that it can to block access to government information that would inform the American people what is being done in their name.

There is only one law of espionage—there are always going to be spies.

The FBI is full of Fordham graduates keeping tabs on Harvard Men in the State Department.

Secrecy is as essential to Intelligence as vestments to a Mass, or darkness to a spiritualist seance, and must at all costs be maintained, quite irrespective of whether or not it serves any purpose.

Espionage is largely separate from the mainstream of foreign policy … you nail the spy and you punish him, and you move on.

Abolish the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency.

Hoover had us [FBI agents and officials] prepare material for McCarthy regularly. We kept furnishing it to him while Hoover publicly denied that we were helping him.

This town leaks like a sieve. Sometimes I think that the easiest thing on the world would be to be a spy against the United States of America

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.