Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Quotes

Spying has always gone on since ancient times.

When I cleared out Moscow apartment after stepping down as president, they found all kinds of wiring in the walls. It turned out that they had been spying on me all along.

We planted bugs, microphones, in premises which interested us in the West. We weren't too successful - I would have said unfortunately in former years, but I don't care anymore now.

Espionage takes place in the world. Even we commit espionage.

It is hard to work with the nagging doubt that perhaps some foreign intelligence agency is reading all your correspondence, especially when you know they have done so in the past.

When I did counterintelligence investigations, they rarely saw the inside of a courtroom. That wasn't the goal of them.

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

The NSA's business is 'information dominance,' the use of other people's secrets to shape events.

There was a possibility I could have been under surveillance.

If we had known that one of those terrorist attacks was coming, could our government have electronically eavesdropped on the attackers without a warrant?

Most of the results of using technical bugging devices were of little importance for my service. It may have been different in counter-intelligence, where bugs in flats, etc., were used to obtain a lot of information about what counter-intelligence was interested in.

When you join the CIA, you have to make some peace with whether you are comfortable psychologically and philosophically, with the use of force and using it clandestinely.

It would be highly useful to government espionage to have reports from all our bookstores, all our hardware and retail stores, all our drugstores…. What one buys at the hardware and retail stores may furnish clues to potential uses of wires, soap powders, and the like used by criminals.

An intelligence service is the ideal vehicle for a conspiracy [against its own government]. Its members can travel about at home and abroad under secret orders, and no questions are asked. Every scrap of paper in the files, its membership, its expenditure of funds, its contacts, even enemy contacts, are state secrets.

] The vast industry of mutual surveillance that grew up alongside the industry of mutual destruction is not about to disappear. The spies, like the weapons, are here to stay. And proliferate, sooner or later, whether we like it or not.

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

Everybody spies on everybody.

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

The National Security Agency vacuums up information about virtually every telephone call to, from or within the United States.

We're not interested in applications where you're spying on people.

At least 80% of fibre-optic cables globally go via the U.S. This is no accident and allows the U.S. to view all communication coming in. At least 80% of all audio calls, not just metadata, are recorded and stored in the U.S. The NSA lies about what it stores.

There is no place where espionage is not possible.

Spies are the ears and eyes of Princes.

Everybody spies on everybody, I mean, that's just a fact.

It's rather fun writing a female spy, because she has so much more kit. Bond never carried a hair dryer or a makeup bag. And he certainly didn't wear an uplift bra.