Lawrence Wilkerson Quotes

It's interesting in this day and age to do a film about political espionage and wiretapping. I don't think that those types of secrets that J. Edgar Hoover was able to obtain and keep for such a long period of time would be possible in today's world, with the Internet and WikiLeaks.

On the question of information security, he claims that, in a Trump Administration, the U.S. government will not spy on its own citizens. If true, this would represent a turn away from the strong language that he has used about identifying terrorists on our soil.

It is hard to work with the nagging doubt that perhaps some foreign intelligence agency is reading all your correspondence, especially when you know they have done so in the past.

We can't spy on them if they aren't spying on us, now can we?" Warped logic, but okay.

The human spy, in terms of the American espionage effort, had never been terribly pertinent.

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

I assume everything I'm saying in an email or saying on the telephone is being looked at.

We have some material on spying by a major government on the tech industry. Industrial espionage.

There will always be spies. We have to have them. Without them we wouldn't have got Osama bin Laden - it took us years, but it happened.

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

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.

What good does it do to spend millions to protect ourselves against espionage if our secrets just leak away.

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

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

I want to make it clear … that America is not interested in spying on ordinary citizens.

There's still a lot of things you can legitimately do to make America safe through electronic surveillance.

It's a genuine dilemma for governments, deciding how much information to share in this threat-filled era.

The government does not deny it routinely spies to advance American economic advantage, which is part of its broad definition of how it protects American national security.

No one would argue that it's in the United States' interest to have independent knowledge of the plans and intentions of foreign countries. But we need to think about where to draw the line on these kind of operations so we're not always attacking our allies, the people we trust, the people we need to rely on, and to have them in turn rely on us.

The European Union needs to reinvent its security system. It needs to break the stovepipes that prevent sharing information, enforcing borders and protecting citizens.

The problem of end-to-end encryption isn't just a terrorism issue.

Edward Snowden, who worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, professes to have had access to whatever he wanted to know about anyone's anything. If he's telling the truth, why does he have such permeability without any government oversight? Is that OK with you?

Everybody has a hacking capability. And probably every intelligence service is hacking in the territory of other countries. But who exactly does what? That would be a very sensitive piece of information. But it's very difficult to communicate about it. Because nobody wants to admit the scope of what they're doing.

It will be the CIA's mission and my own if confirmed to ensure that the agency remains the best in the world at its core mission - collecting what our enemies do not want us to know. In short, the CIA must be the world's premier espionage organization.

When the United States cannibalize dollars from the defensive business of the NSA, securing our communications, protecting our systems, patching zero-day vulnerabilities, and instead we're giving those dollars to be used for creating new vulnerabilities in our systems so that they can surveil us and other people abroad who use the same systems.