Classified Data Quotes

A real secret is something which only one person knows.

Any information about U.S. special operations forces is highly sensitive.

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

National security is a serious matter and I do not think it is in proper to discuss such details in a public forum.

If members of the security apparatus could, with impunity, keep from those elected by the people that which they're entitled to know - or worse, feed false information - those who could control the classified data could be the real decision makers.

The U.S. government places considerable trust in those given access to classified information, and we are committed to prosecuting those who abuse that trust.

What happens when I'm dealing with the problems in North Korea and the Middle East? Are you folks going to be reporting all that very, very confidential information, very important, very - you know, at the highest level? Are you going to be reporting about that, too? So I don't want classified information getting out into the public in a way that was almost a test.

And when you have it, what then? Some secrets are safer kept hidden. Some secrets are too dangerous to share, even with those you love and trust.

Regarding Wikileaks, I have profound ambivalent feelings about it. I am a firm believer in a strong intelligence service. There's a need for classified information.

The higher the classification of secrecy, the quicker you will report it.

The first rule in keeping secrets is nothing on paper.

Will Hillary [Clinton] survive or will the villains...? [James] Comey and the FBI and the Republicans, will they succeed? There isn't any coverage of whether or not Hillary actually broke the law. The media's not interested in whether or not she actually trafficked in classified data.

We need to make sure that leaks of classified information, of national security secrets, needs to be rigorously pursued and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

For something that's supposed to be secret, there is a lot of intelligence history. Every time I read one book, two more are published.

Information on UFOs, including sighting reports, has been and is still being officially withheld.

The thing about secrets is that they are usually best kept by just one person. That was the special thing about secrets. Some people seemed to think that the best way to keep a secret was to tell as many people as possible; what could possibly go wrong for a secret when there were so many people defending it?

There are some secrets you want to keep to yourself, even if they don't matter. They might only matter if you keep them secret.

Oh, Grey, no one really likes keeping secrets. The only thing that makes a secret fun is knowing that you weren't supposed to tell it.

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.

Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.

I was in the CIA for nine years. I am intimately familiar with the information classification system. I used it every day on the job. Like every other one of my colleagues at the agency, I approached the handling of classified information with immense care because I understand the ramifications.

Secrets have power, and that power diminishes when they are shared, so they are best kept and kept well. Sharing secrets, real secrets, important ones, with even one other person, will change them.

[Defining state secrets:] All state affairs which have not yet been decided upon, or which have been decided upon but not yet been made public.

Hillary Clinton was an outstanding secretary of state. She would never intentionally put America in any kind of jeopardy. And what I also know, because I handle a lot of classified information, is that there's classified and then there's classified. There's stuff that is really top secret top secret, and there's stuff that is being presented to the president or the secretary of state that you might not want on the transom or, you know, going out over the wire, but is basically stuff that you could get in open source.

I would say that [David] Petraeus and [Hillary] Clinton are being handled very difficultly by this administration over arguably exactly the same issue, which was the handling of classified information over a personal email.