Robert Mueller Quotes

We want our spying agencies spying on foreigners. That’s why we have them.

Americans don’t spy on Americans.

This country, for reasons of history, culture and therefore law, has had an allergy to domestic intelligence.

U.S. intelligence has the legal right to monitor foreign communications as they go through to U.S. service providers. However, even though something is legal doesn't make it right. I'm not American; I don't really care about what data is being collected about American citizens. I'm worried about us, the foreigners.

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

The United States Intelligence community collects too much information.

The shadowy world of foreign intelligence-gathering – the American government’s most secret and least accountable enterprise – is now the Bush administration’s main legal weapon in the war on terrorism.

There are more foreign intelligence officers inside the US now, working against US interests, than there were at the height of the cold war.

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.

If we give the impression that every one of our technological advances in this country, be it Microsoft, Google, Yahoo or anything else, are really an instrument of our intelligence agencies, how far do you think they are really going to go?

… there has been no instance in which NSA could say with confidence that the outcome would have been different without the... telephony meta-data program.

Europeans don't like to talk about intelligence, and they often pretend their countries don't spy.

It's hardly a news flash that a secret, clandestine intelligence agency might resist giving out information about its operations when not not legally required to do so.

As a former F.B.I. special agent who conducted counterintelligence investigations, I can attest that foreign intelligence services do not operate on the basis of explicit agreements or even actions that, standing alone, constitute criminal activity.

U.S. intelligence services routinely use collection methods against foreigners that foreseeably - with certainty - ingest high volumes of U.S. communications as well.

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.

SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, also has no executive powers and operates abroad on CIA lines, but with a tiny percentage of the budget and a tiny percentage of the personnel.

The NSA has different reporting requirements for each branch of government and each of its legal authorities.

I suspect Obama did not know he was recording Angela Merkel's cell phones.

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.

You can't come forward against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and be completely free from risk.

NSA surveillance is a complex subject - legally, technically and operationally.

The PATRIOT Act brought down the wall separating intelligence agencies from law enforcement and other entities charged with protecting the Nation from terrorism.

The United States, like any great power, is always going to have an intelligence operation, and some electronic surveillance is obligatory in the modern world.

There is not much of a bureaucratic leap, if history is any guide, between a seemingly benign call for 'continuous situational awareness' and the onset of a covert and illegal campaign of domestic surveillance.