Information Gathering Quotes

Washington tends to be full of too many traps. I think reporters there do a lot of attending news briefings and news conferences expecting to get the real news out of those relatively sterile environments. But you've got to deal with the obscure people as well as the names.

It [the CIA] was not intended as a Cloak & Dagger Outfit. It was intended merely as a center for keeping the President of what was going on in the World…I never wanted the CIA to act as a spy organization. That was never the intention when it was organized.

Generally you should act somewhere between P40 and P70, as I call it. Sometime after you have obtained 40 percent of all the information you are liable to get, start thinking in terms of making a decision. When you have about 70 percent of all the information, you probably ought to decide, because you may lose an opportunity in losing time.

When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.

There's something advantageous about having people underestimate your intellect, insomuch as a lot of things are revealed to you. They assume you don't know what you're talking about, then all of a sudden, you do. And the next thing you know, you have information you wouldn't normally have.

I don't really read the papers.

We have 17 different intelligence agencies and they are all basic;ly doing the same thing.

After reading about the Al Ain Oasis by ECWC, I became curious about cultivating dates, and browsed about the web a bit, learning.

You want to get both sides of the story and it's my role to try and bring that out of people.

It used to be radio was the place that young people gathered to get their information.

The necessity of procuring good Intelligence is apparent & need not be further urged-All that remains for me to add, is, that you keep the whole matter as secret as possible. For upon Secrecy, Success depends in most Enterprizes of the kind, and for want of it, they are generally defeated, however well planned & promising a favourable issue.

I think it's safe to say that the Russians are extremely interested in anything that has to do with the U.S. political system. And it's not out of the realm of possibility that they are in many other systems.

I wasn't a spy. I'd have been spotted in five seconds. Yes, I was in intelligence, but that covered a multitude of things.

Every intelligence operation carries risks.

To prepare for the future, we must be willing to test new concepts. This means we must acquire enough information to evaluate these concepts and not be like travelers in a foreign land who compare everything with their own hometown.

The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes the middle course, it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own.

One of the things that distinguishes the CIA from the State Department is that the CIA is both asked to, and authorized to, steal secrets. So if the question is whether the CIA steals secrets, the answer is yes.

Intelligence collection has its place—no question—… But no matter how important collection is, in the short and even the long run, it just doesn’t cost very much.

When you want to learn about something, what is the first thing you do... you go to the internet.

I'm a reporter by nature, I want to know everything.

Recently it's become much to my surprise, something that does happen. For example, I used to get almost all of my stories, and it's probably still true, from newspapers. Primarily from The New York Times. No one ever really thinks of The New York Times as a tabloid newspaper and it isn't a tabloid newspaper. But there is a tabloid newspaper within The New York Times very, very often.

I felt the call to this industry because I enjoy broadcast journalism. I'm steeped in the news because I enjoy the news - I like reading papers; I like reading the blogs. I love talking to newsmakers and pundits, for that matter, about their opinions. I'm an information gatherer by nature, so that's what attracted me about this industry.

It's ironic that this amazing invention of the Internet has made information gathering easier available than ever, but that this platform also helps spread misinformation.

The aim of a foreign intelligence service is to find and convince individuals to help them achieve intelligence objectives.

The best way to find things out is not to ask questions at all. If you fire off a question, it is like firing off a gun - bang it goes