Alberto Gonzales Quotes

But the Congress has made the determination that certain kinds of information can be protected even though the American people may want to have access to information.

Our democratic values also include - and our national security demands - open and transparent government. Some information obviously needs to be protected. And since his first days in office, President Obama has worked to strike the proper balance between the security the American people deserve and the openness our democratic society expects.

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

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.

In real danger sometimes even a democracy can really keep a secret.

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

People in power tend to be not as enthusiastic about open records as they were before they came to power.

As there is no spiking-the-football exception to our open-records laws, Judicial Watch initiated a federal court battle with the administration over the release of postmortem images of bin Laden and his alleged burial at sea.

WikiLeaks is what happens when the entire U.S. government is forced to go through a full-body scanner.

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

Many state parole boards claim exemptions from state sunshine laws that would be unthinkable for other government officials.

It’s hard to sometimes get information out of the government. It’s really hard. You can’t do it without asking tough questions.

Can the public business be thus transacted and in secret?

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.

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.

National security is the fig leaf against freedom of information.

Bureaucracy always seeks the path of least disclosure.

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

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

Regarding Wikileaks, I have profound ambivalent feelings about it. I am a firm believer in a strong intelligence service. There's a need for classified information.

Our constitutional system is defined by a balance between the public's need for transparency and the government's need to have a zone of secrecy around decision making. Both are important, yet they are mutually exclusive.

It is hard to imagine having a government more secretive than the United States. Virtually everything that government does, of any significance, is conducted behind an extreme wall of secrecy. The very few leaks that we’ve had over the last decade are basically the only ways that we’ve had to learn what our government is doing.

I released 34 years of tax returns and 300,000 e-mails in my government record. To get the information from Hillary Clinton, you need to get a subpoena from the FBI.

I'm a freedom of information campaigner, so obviously I support the cause of Wikileaks.

The job of a journalist is to find out stuff. The job of the government - sometimes - is to keep stuff secret. There's a natural tension there.