Bob Beckel Quotes

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.

It is incontestable that even under the best of circumstances and when dealing with the friendliest and most stable of allies that intelligence organizations of foreign powers must not be permitted to become established on American soil and should be discouraged wherever possible from taking root any place in this Hemisphere.

Americans don’t spy on Americans.

This country, for reasons of history, culture and therefore law, has had an allergy to domestic intelligence.

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

In the Chinese view, the United States has designed its own system of rules about what constitutes 'legal' spying and what is illegal.

Congress hasn't declared war on the countries - the majority of them are our allies - but without asking for public permission, NSA is running network operations against them that affect millions of innocent people. And for what? So we can have secret access to a computer in a country we're not even fighting?

Most of the secrets the CIA has are about people, not machines and systems, so I didn't feel comfortable with disclosures that I thought could endanger anyone.

There is not much of a bureaucratic leap, if history is any guide, between a seemingly benign call for 'continuous situational awareness' and the onset of a covert and illegal campaign of domestic surveillance.

We shouldn't send CIA spooks to overthrow governments.

The shadowy world of foreign intelligence-gathering – the American government’s most secret and least accountable enterprise – is now the Bush administration’s main legal weapon in the war on terrorism.

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

Prior to the present war [WWII], the United States had no foreign intelligence service. It never has had and does not have a coordinated intelligence service.

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.

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.

Everybody spies on everybody.

Our agency (the Central Intelligence Agency) is the last refuge of organizational privacy available to the U. S. Government.

… there has been no instance in which NSA could say with confidence that the outcome would have been different without the... telephony meta-data program.

All his training as a lawyer and a judge was that you didn’t do illegal things. He could never accept that this is exactly what the CIA does when it operates abroad. We break the laws of their countries. It’s how we collect information. It’s why we’re in business.

We want our spying agencies spying on foreigners. That’s why we have them.

Europeans don't like to talk about intelligence, and they often pretend their countries don't spy.

SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, also has no executive powers and operates abroad on CIA lines, but with a tiny percentage of the budget and a tiny percentage of the personnel.

A major theme in all my books is that the CIA is not only the first line of defense but they should also be the first line of offense.

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

I think all governments engage in intelligence gathering vis-a-vis other governments.