Scott Ritter Quotes

When you're told to go brief a United States senator on a covert operation, you go do it. And you trust the information isn't going to leak.

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.

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.

The United States is the only country in the world that has ever released the operations files of its intelligence agency.

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.

Anyone who studies declassified documents soon becomes aware that government secrecy is largely an effort to protect policy makers from scrutiny by citizens, not to protect the country from enemies.

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.

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.

Well, it's a - I don't want to disappoint you, but it's a time worn tradition of Australian Governments over many years not to get into any discussion about that aspect of intelligence matters.

The Obama administration does not hate unauthorized leaks of classified information. They are more responsible for such leaks than anyone. What they hate are leaks that embarrass them or expose their wrongdoing. Those are the only kinds of leaks that are prosecuted.

In the '60s - and right up to the present day - the identity of a member of the British Secret Services was and is, quite rightly, a state secret. To divulge it is a crime. The Services may choose to leak a name when it pleases them.

In the Pentagon Papers case, the government asserted in the Supreme Court that the publication of the material was a threat to national security. It turned out it was not a threat to U.S. security. But even if it had been, that doesn't mean that it couldn't be published.

I don't think that any government has a right to subvert the truth or to cover up the truth, and all I see WikiLeaks doing is exposing the truth.

The National Security Agency plays so highly specialized a role in the defense and security of the United States that an outsider can actually describe its activities. They are guarded not only from the public but from other government agencies as well. The Civil Service Commission, which audits all government positions, is not allowed to know what NSA employees do.

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.

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

An obsession with secrecy persists in leading industrial countries.

The Official Secrets Act is not to protect secrets. It’s to protected officials.

Some information has to remain in the privy of the office of the Prime Minister and the ministers for the proper administration of government.

The attached paper is sensitive, particularly if its existence were to leak. It has not been given, and will not be given to any other official of the government. Title: Implications of an Unfavorable Outcome in Vietnam.

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

When I blew the whistle on the whole thing, it was [William J.] Casey who, I felt, regarded what I had done as treason.

Americans should sense danger when a government tries to stop a newspaper from disclosing the origins of an unpopular war ... or accuses a newspaper of endangering national security by disclosing secret and illegal wiretapping.

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