Glenn Greenwald Quotes

It's my father's legacy. My father's view was that the public is the employer of these government employees and has the right to know what they're up to.

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.

It is only when there is the supervision and critical oversight from the people that the government will be in a position to do an even better job, and employees of government departments will be the true public servants of the people.

And one of the things I've tried to do in my first months in office is to give more Georgians - reporters and members of the general public alike - a closer look at how their government works.

It appears to the American people that the government is intent on prying into every nook and cranny of people’s private lives, while at the same time doing all that it can to block access to government information that would inform the American people what is being done in their name.

We don’t have to choose between preserving privacy and preventing terrorism. We do have to decide how much oversight and accountability there should be when the government conducts surveillance on its citizens.

As long as the government's actions are secret, it cannot be held accountable. A government for the people and by the people should be transparent to the people.

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.

Government must be a transparent garment which tightly clings to the people's body.

There can be no faith in government if our highest offices are excused from scrutiny - they should be setting the example of transparency.

I am committed to working towards a more transparent, accountable, and ethical federal government worthy of the public's trust.

Ethics in government has always been important to me.

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

Secret government programs that pry into people's private affairs are bound up with ideas about secrecy and privacy that arose during the process by which the mysterious became secular.

To restore and keep the public's confidence in the integrity of their government, state government and its officials must be open, honest and transparent.

We can't have democracy if we're having to protect you and our users from the government over stuff we've never had a conversation about. We need to know what the parameters are, what kind of surveillance the government is going to do, and how and why.

All officers of the Intelligence Community, and especially its most senior officer, must conduct themselves in a manner that earns and retains the public trust. The American people are uncomfortable with government activities that do not take place in the open, subject to public scrutiny and review.

For years now I have been talking about personal responsibility and accountability, both in our private lives and in the halls of government. Those are important principles here in Idaho, and they will form the basis of this administration.

I want to make sure we are presenting to the South Australian people a Government that is open and accountable. I want to make sure that we maintain public confidence in government at all levels.

Government ought to be all outside and no inside [for] corruption thrives in secret places [and] it [is] a fair presumption that secrecy means impropriety.

The CIA claims that secrecy is necessary to hide what it's doing from enemies of the United States ... the real reason for secrecy is to hide what the CIA is doing from the American people.

Can the public business be thus transacted and in secret?

… a guarantee of public access to government information is indispensable in the long run for any democratic society.... if officials make public only what they want citizens to know, then publicity becomes a sham and accountability meaningless.

Bureaucracy always seeks the path of least disclosure.

Secrecy is an instrument of conspiracy; it ought not, therefore, to be the system of a regular government