Jean Chretien Quotes

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.

You can’t have Congressional hearings on classified matters.

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

Henry Kissinger never wanted the 20,000 pages of his telephone transcripts made public - not while he was alive, at any rate.

[Defining state secrets:] All state affairs which have not yet been decided upon, or which have been decided upon but not yet been made public.

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

It is essential to efficient and effective administration that employees of the Executive Branch be in a position to be completely candid in advising each other on official matters ... it is not in the public interest that any of their conversations or communications, or any documents or reproductions, concerning such advice be disclosed.

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

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.

An obsession with secrecy persists in leading industrial countries.

Throughout [Barack] Obama's career, he promised to limit the state secrets doctrine which the Bush-Cheney administration had abused enormously.

Despite a campaign that was based on a very powerful promise of transparency, President Obama, and again in my view quite correctly, has used the state secrets argument in a variety of courts, as much as President Bush.

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.

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

Classification is used, not to protect the national interest but to prevent national embarrassment.

Communicate no other intelligence to Congress at large than what may be necessary to promote the common weal, not to gratify the curiosity of individuals.

We should certainly declassify any information that we know that the enemy knows. At that point it is only the American people who are in the dark.

The Official Secrets Act is not to protect secrets. It’s to protected officials.

Everything the CIA does is secret and it is secret particularly from the Congress.

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.

Bureaucracy always seeks the path of least disclosure.

In a democracy threatened by excessive secrecy and the criminalizing of news gathering, the more sunlight the better.

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

Politicians often refuse to talk about things on the grounds of national security. Most of the time it’s not national security; it’s national embarrassment.

I've spent a lot of time working on declassified documents - and they do get declassified after decades - you look at the record of declassified documents, and they are mostly concerned with keeping what the government does secret from its own population. It's mostly defense of the power system from its own population. Very little is authentic security.