Gabriel Schoenfeld Quotes

The law does not distinguish terribly well between real secrets and sort-of secrets, especially in an age when the instinct to stamp “classified” runs rampant.

The present trend toward Government secrecy could end in a dictatorship. The more information there is made available, the greater will be the nation’s security.

An obsession with secrecy persists in leading industrial countries.

We should certainly declassify any information that we know that the enemy knows. At that point it is only the American people who are in the dark.

Government will have to learn what private businesses are beginning to realize that in this increasingly transparent world, the successful organizations will be those that are able to operate with very few secrets…. The cost of maintaining secrecy is getting higher and higher even when it can be done at all.

National security is the fig leaf against freedom of information.

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

The very word 'secrecy' is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths, and to secret proceedings.

Classification is used, not to protect the national interest but to prevent national embarrassment.

We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things the general public does not need to know, and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows

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.

All registers which, it is acknowledged, ought to be kept secret, ought certainly never to exist.

Secrecy is for losers.... It is time to dismantle government secrecy, this most persuasive of Cold War-era regulations. It is time to begin building the supports for the era of openness that is already upon us.

Bureaucracy always seeks the path of least disclosure.

Under the classification rules observed by the Senate, we are not even allowed to tap out the truth in Morse code—and we tried just about everything else we could think of to warn the American people.

Usually the public is better off with more information than less. That includes information the government would like to keep quiet.

I believe that the American People have a right to know what was done in their name..

If we cannot keep secrets, it is impossible for our leaders to have the adequate information on which to base their policies.

Secrecy is never so appealing as in a free society.

Obama's openness is a welcome change from his predecessor, who went all the way to the Supreme Court to hide the RSVP list for a single policy meeting. And transparency is intrinsically good, since in a democracy, very little government activity is legitimately secret.

It's increasingly clear that governments, major corporations, banks, universities and other such bodies view the defense of their secrets as a desperate matter of institutional survival, so much so that the state has gone to extraordinary lengths to punish and/or threaten to punish anyone who so much as tiptoes across the informational line.

I've got nothing to hide.

In intelligence work, there are limits to the amount of information one can share. Confidentiality is essential.

The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.

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