Hillary Clinton Quotes

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

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

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.

The Obama administration has provided almost no public information about the NSA's compliance record.

A significant number of pages and sentences that the administration wants to keep in a classified status have already been released publicly, some of it by public statements of the leadership of the CIA and the FBI.

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.

For a long time now, there has been too much secrecy in this city. This administration stands on the side not of those seek to withhold information but who seek to make it known.

Wikileaks is providing information on what ambassadors are sending to Washington and things like that. Maybe some of that has a right to some kind of secrecy, but there is a heavy burden and I think its pretty hard to meet. I haven't read everything from Wikileaks by any means but the parts that I have read and seen I think are things the public should know.

Excessive administration secrecy... feeds conspiracy theories and reduces the public's confidence in government.

I've spent a lot of time working on declassified documents - and they do get declassified after decades - you look at the record of declassified documents, and they are mostly concerned with keeping what the government does secret from its own population. It's mostly defense of the power system from its own population. Very little is authentic security.

If any individual who objects to government policy can take it in their own hands to publicly disclose classified information, then we will never be able to keep our people safe or conduct foreign policy.

I'll turn the page on a growing empire of classified information. We'll protect sources and methods, but we won't use sources and methods to hide the truth.

Before the Freedom of Information Act, I used to say at meetings "The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer." [...] But since the Freedom of Information Act, I'm afraid to say things like that.

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.

Diplomacy is, perhaps, one element of the U.S. government that should not be subject to the demands of 'open government'; whenever it works, it is usually because it is done behind closed doors. But this may be increasingly hard to achieve in the age of Twittering bureaucrats.

State courts usually rule that correspondence between government officials, about government business, are public records, whether they use their government e-mail accounts or private ones.

Given the pervasive secrecy of the Bush-Cheney administration, and the sorry consequences of that disposition, President Barack Obama's early emphasis on openness in government seems almost inevitable.

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.

I would never jeopardize classified information to be brought out to the public. This information is all open source. There is no reason to worry about classification. It is simply an attempt by bureaucrats to cover their rear ends.

I far more trust the press than I do the Administration with judgment of what should be secret and what shouldn’t. How many scandals has the Administration uncovered on its own?

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.

You can’t have Congressional hearings on classified matters.

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

I have no disposition to withhold any information which the duty of my station will permit, or the public good shall require to be disclosed: and in fact, all the Papers affecting the negotiation with Great Britain were laid before the Senate, when the Treaty itself was communicated for their consideration and advice

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.