Trevor Paglen Quotes

During the Cold War, we gathered information by listening to the Soviets, taking pictures of the Soviets, and we allowed our human intelligence to decline.

The intelligence community is built, resourced, designed, trained, and focused around secrecy. We try to obtain the secrets of our adversaries and we try and keep secret how we are doing so.

The National Security Agency: Where Intelligence Goes To Work

Most people don't know what goes on in the intelligence services. Certainly I had very little idea what went on in GCHQ. For me it was a job, a chance to use my languages.

For an old spy and codebreaker like myself, nothing in the world happens by coincidence.

At least 80% of fibre-optic cables globally go via the U.S. This is no accident and allows the U.S. to view all communication coming in. At least 80% of all audio calls, not just metadata, are recorded and stored in the U.S. The NSA lies about what it stores.

I excelled in finding and acquiring secret information that I obtained in brush passes, dead drops, or in meetings in dusty alleys of third world capitals.

I'm not a spy for Russia or China or any other country for that matter.

The necessity of procuring good Intelligence is apparent & need not be further urged-All that remains for me to add, is, that you keep the whole matter as secret as possible. For upon Secrecy, Success depends in most Enterprizes of the kind, and for want of it, they are generally defeated, however well planned & promising a favourable issue.

The sovereign must have full knowledge of the activities of the five sorts of agents. This knowledge must come from the double agents, and therefore it is mandatory that they be treated with the utmost liberality.

That’s the thing about spies. Most of the secrets we keep are from each other.

[I will] totally dismantle every intelligence agency in this country piece by piece, nail by nail, brick by brick

Reconnaissance memoranda should always be written in the simplest style and be purely descriptive. They should never stray from their objective by introducing extraneous ideas.

In America, we collect more digital communications from America than we do from the Russians.

Everybody thinks it's glamorous and this spy versus spy stuff is so exciting, but working in that industry and being a CIA operative, like a field officer, is tough. That's a difficult job that usually dismantles their lives in some capacity.

Signs cannot be represented, in a spy's report, so damningly as words.

O to be a dragon, a symbol of the power of Heaven-of silk-worm size or immense; at times invisible. Felicitous phenomenon!

Spies cannot be usefully employed without a certain intuitive sagacity.

What state surveillance actually is is best understood by the NSA's own documents and own words, which I think as you know I happen to have a lot of.

Look, the FBI has the tools necessary un-American activities in our country. It goes on, we shouldn't even be talking about it.

In the old days, spies had done they'd done because they loved their country, because they believed in what they were doing. But he'd never been given a choice. Nowadays, spies weren't employed. They were used.

When I cleared out Moscow apartment after stepping down as president, they found all kinds of wiring in the walls. It turned out that they had been spying on me all along.

Spies are the ears and eyes of Princes.

Fox News has learned some United States investigators believe that there are Israelis again very much engaged in spying in and on the United States, who may have known things they didn't tell us before September 11, 2001.

I think that is so interesting. It is le Carré. There must be so much of him when he was younger. He's an interesting character. I don't want to say the word "passive" because there is something very active about the way he is passive, if that makes any sense: the nature of his watching and his listening is active. It is always so alive because he is, essentially, a spy.