Barton Gellman Quotes

I am a linear thinker in a lot of ways.

I always try to stay methodical and logical with everything I do, playing cricket and making decisions.

My job is to be skeptical: skeptical of people like Edward Snowden and skeptical of the U.S. government.

With method and logic one can accomplish anything.

Snowden grants that NSA employees by and large believe in their mission and trust the agency to handle the secrets it takes from ordinary people - deliberately, in the case of bulk records collection, and 'incidentally,' when the content of American phone calls and e-mails are swept into NSA systems along with foreign targets.

It was a good 15 or 20 years before anyone at Rand would be in the same room with me. They didn't want the question raised, 'What's your relationship with Daniel Ellsberg?' And not one of them wrote me a letter because they didn't want a letter of theirs to show up in my trash - which the FBI had been going through.

I don't really get things very... intuitively. I mean, I don't immediately understand things. The only way I really get it is by writing it down.

Science is nothing, but trained and organized common sense.

I'm a puzzle doer.

I was a keen observer and listener. I picked up on clues. I figured things out logically, and I enjoyed puzzles. I loved the clear, focused feeling that came when I concentrated on solving a problem and everything else faded out.

Once you start looking at the world rationally, it becomes much more exciting.

We should be adult enough to understand that major countries are going to be spying on us.

An obsession with secrecy persists in leading industrial countries.

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

… the government should not be permitted to collect and store mass, undigested, non-public personal information.

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.

I was very happy to learn Oliver Stone had decided to make a film about Edward Snowden and believe this is a powerful and inspiring film.

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

I try to look at problems very clearly and think, 'How do we get out of this? What will work? What will be the consequences for the people involved?'

I mean, the FBI has to assure people who come and help them that they're going to be able to keep their identities confidential and protect them.

I have a very linear mind.

I call people who are covering up NSA crimes traitors.

I think you have to be left-brained, to a certain extent, to understand science. I can talk about it, but I can't do it.

In my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden's release of NSA material – and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago.