Peter T. King Quotes

The government has investigated our program of collecting through a generalized fashion, everyone's phone records in the country. And they found that no terrorist case has been thwarted through this.

As digital communications have multiplied, and NSA capabilities with them, the agency has shifted resources from surveillance of individual targets to the acquisition of communications on a planetary scale.

For months, Obama administration officials attacked Snowden's motives and said the work of the NSA was distorted by selective leaks and misinterpretations.

Right after 9/11, I mean, every agency can give their own gradation, but a nice, popular rule of thumb is everybody doubled down. I ended up in NSA with about twice as much money as I had prior to 9/11.

Here are some additional things we (the National Security Agency) can do for the War on Terror but we may not do them because we do not have the authority

I'm not against the NSA. I'm not against spying; I'm not against looking at phone records.

What we've seen over the last decade is we've seen a departure from the traditional work of the National Security Agency. They've become sort of the national hacking agency, the national surveillance agency. And they've lost sight of the fact that everything they do is supposed to make us more secure as a nation and a society.

Counterterrorism, cyberterrorism, it's real.

The bottom line is we are pursuing every single possible action to keep our country safe from terrorism.

What we need to do, is restore those tools that have been taken away by the president [Barack Obama] and others, restore those tools to the NSA and to our entire surveillance and law enforcement community.

The key question: will the NSA continue to monitor hundreds of millions of people without any suspicion? Under Obama's proposals: Yes.

Accusations fit on Greenwald really sounds like he's against all surveillance unless you can find a guy with the Al Qaeda card, wearing an Al Qaeda baseball cap, an Al Qaeda uniform.

I came in with a healthy skepticism about these programs. My team evaluated them. We scrubbed them thoroughly. We actually expanded some of the oversight, increased some of the safeguards. But my assessment, and my team's assessment was that they help us prevent terrorist attacks. In the abstract, you can complain about 'Big Brother' and how this is a potential program run amok. But when you actually look at the details, then, I think we've struck the right balance.

The people at the NSA aren't trying to ruin your life. They're not trying to put you in authoritarian dystopia. These are normal people trying to do good work in hard circumstances.

We need to put the security back in the National Security Agency. We can't have the national surveillance agency.

If a regular law enforcement agency wants your phone records, all they have to do is issue a subpoena. But now the intelligence agency is not able to quickly gather records and look at them to see who these terrorists are calling.

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.

I've directed the full resources of our intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and bring them to justice. We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.

We have determined enemies who will use any means available to take the lives of as many Americans as possible. They cheered when the Twin Towers fell. They dream of even larger calamities. They must be stopped. And that requires an intelligence system that finds them, before they harm us.

This is my number one priority. I've got a lot of things on my plate. But my top priority is to defeat ISIL and to eliminate the scourge of this barbaric terrorism that's been taking place around the world. Groups like ISIL can't destroy us. They can't defeat us. They don't produce anything. They're not an existential threat to us. It is very important for us to not respond with fear.

I'm glad that the NSA is trying to find out what the terrorists are up to overseas and in our country. I'm glad that activity is going on, but it is limited to tracking people who are suspected to be terrorists and who they may be talking to... Yes, I am sure that that's what they're doing.

These [NSA] programs were never about terrorism: they're about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They're about power.

The law I sign today directs new funds and new focus to the task of collecting vital intelligence on terrorist threats and on weapons of mass production.

Nobody ever was fired for 9/11. Instead of firing the people who didn't do a good job, we gave them medals. The guy who did a good job, I don't know what happened to him. And what we did was we decided we'd just collect everybody's information. That we'd sort of scrap the Bill of Rights.

It's critical how we want to use these spy programs, these electronic capabilities, where we want to draw the line, and who should approve these programs, these decisions, and at what level, for engaging in operations that could lead us as a nation into a war.