Ben Bradlee Quotes

WikiLeaks is a important focus of our attention.

What Wikileaks exposed is kind of superficial in a way.

There’s no town in the world that has the leaks that come out of this town. [Washington, DC.]

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.

I don't welcome leaks. There's a reason why these programs are classified.

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

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.

There should be at least one leak like the Pentagon Papers every year.

People intrinsically know there are secrets being held from us. Look at WikiLeaks: There are secrets that are really true to the world.

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 most secretive White House in modern history has learned the hard way …that it must reveal a pretty steady stream of secrets.

Washington is a cesspool of non-accountability.

Bureaucracy always seeks the path of least disclosure.

Congress leaks. That’s a fact of life.

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

Unlike Hillary Clinton, who has risked so many lives with her careless handling of sensitive information, my administration will not telegraph exactly military plans and what they are.

WikiLeaks serves as a back-up for those who want to tell the truth about the inner workings of government when the mainstream media is not willing or taking too long to publish.

If we really care about safety we would close down WikiLeaks. We would treat the people at WikiLeaks as enemy combatants. We would declare that the kind of thing this private did is treason. WikiLeaks is not a fun and games event. WikiLeaks undermines profoundly the ability of the United States to work around the world. Why would you, if you were a foreigner thinking about helping the United States, why would you confide anything to an American when you know that it could end up in The New York Times based on some leak?

Most of what is done I think is to kept secret so the public won't know. The same is true of what Wikileaks exposed.

Asking journalists to denounce leaks because of their deleterious effects on the functioning of government is as hopeless as asking an airline to denounce jet fuel because of its impact on the environment.

In Russia everything is a secret, but there is no secrecy.

In Washington, a confidential assistant is someone who, if you don't want to know something, you go and ask him and he won't tell you.

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.

In Washington, the accepted method for passing along information about how the government fails to meet real-world needs is to leak it.

There are many people, including me, who admire the original mission of WikiLeaks.