Intelligence Community Quotes

Congress must go further to protect the right to privacy, to end the NSA's dragnet surveillance of ordinary Americans, to make the intelligence community more transparent and accountable.

The idea that you know more than the intelligence community knows, it's a little like saying, I know more about physics than my professor.

The government would assert that individuals who are aware of serious wrongdoing in the intelligence community should bring their concerns to the people most responsible for that wrongdoing, and rely on those people to correct the problems that those people themselves authorized.

In order to do vigorous oversight, the leadership of the intelligence community has got to be straight with the American people and straight with the Congress. For there to be vigorous oversight, the intelligence community's got to be straight with the American people and the Congress and that has not been the case.

I do have concerns about the current efforts to restructure our nation's intelligence community.

There were no whistleblower protections that would've protected me - and that's known to everybody in the intelligence community. There are no proper channels for making this information available when the system fails comprehensively.

We can no longer expect an Intelligence Community that is mostly male and mostly white to be able to monitor and infiltrate suspicious organizations or terrorist groups.

The intelligence community gets hurt through sequestration.

Woe to you who insults the intelligence community, if you're president.

You listen to the intelligence community, they say, listen, maybe it's ISIS today, it's somebody else tomorrow. We'll deal with the caliphate, but it's going to take years to be able to handle this.

For Donald Trump to dismiss out of hand the intelligence community's fact gathering is, frankly - doesn't bode well for him protecting our country.

I have a running war with the media. And they sort of made it sound like I had a feud with the intelligence community.

Our failure was that our intelligence community thought [Saddam Hussein ] had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction. That was a mistake. There is fallibility in human intelligence and in human decisions.

The way the United States intelligence community operates is it doesn't limit itself to the protection of the homeland. It doesn't limit itself to countering terrorist threats, countering nuclear proliferation. It's also used for economic espionage, for political spying to gain some knowledge of what other countries are doing.

By tearing down the wall between law enforcement and the intelligence community, we have been able to share information in a way that was virtually impossible before the Patriot Act.

ISIL presents a growing threat not only in Syria and Iraq, but throughout the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, and now in the United States as well. Terrorists and their enablers will continue to receive the unwavering attention of law enforcement and the intelligence community.

The intelligence community was absolutely uniform and uniformly wrong about the existence of weapons of mass destruction (in Iraq).

The intelligence community's 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) stated, in a formal presentation to President Bush and to Congress, its view that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction - a belief in which the NIE said it held a 90% level of confidence. That is about as certain as the intelligence community gets on any subject.

No one from the intelligence community, anyplace else ever came in and said, ‘What if Saddam is doing all this deception because he actually got rid of the WMD and he doesn't want the Iranians to know?' Now somebody should have asked that question. I should have asked that question. Nobody did. Turns out that was the most important question in terms of the intelligence failure that never got asked.

Thinklogical's systems play a key role in the delivery and visualization of mission critical data used every day by military and intelligence communities worldwide.

Intelligence communities are very closed communities, but at the same time, you don't only learn how to fight terrorism. You need to learn about life, about West and East, geography, history, culture, there are many, many things that you learn in order to be able to solve puzzles.

I believe that reforming our intelligence community is one of the most important things that we can do in order to ensure that our country is in fact safer, stronger and wiser.

This self-reflection, this willingness to examine ourselves, to make corrections, to do better, that's part of what makes us Americans. It's part of what sets us apart from other nations, the United States is the most professional, most capable, most cutting-edge intelligence community in the world.

We must remain mindful of the potential impact of over-correcting the authorizations of the intelligence community.

Our intelligence community needs better coordination of operations and exchange of information, and that's why we need an overall director of national intelligence and a national counterterrorism center.

Everyone I know who used to be in the intelligence community is moving into the corporate world.

Over the course of two years, we arrived at a point where we began to look at the value added by making information more easily accessible across the intelligence community, both defense and national.

If you look back today over the last 25 years, it is a fact that we have had a progressive degeneration of our intelligence community in general; in particular in the field of human intelligence.

When it comes to telephone calls, nobody is listening to your telephone calls. That's not what this program is about. ... What the intelligence community is doing is looking at phone numbers, and durations of calls; they are not looking at people's names and they're not looking at content. ... If the intelligence committee actually wants to listen to a phone call they have to go back to a federal judge, just like they would in a criminal investigation.

It is abundantly clear that a total review of all intelligence programs is necessary so that members of the Senate Intelligence Committee are fully informed as to what is actually being carried out by the intelligence community.

One of the indictments of civilizations is that happiness and intelligence are so rarely found in the same person.

I don't want to talk about intelligence matters. I will say, however, that intelligence-community estimates should not become public in the way of this city and in the way of Congress.

Our intelligence communities spend a lot of time and effort gathering a lot of strands and a lot of data [on Russian hacking]. There are times where they're very cautious and they say, "We think this is what happened, but we're not certain."

Before Bin Laden did everything but advertise. Yet he had to blow up the Twin Towers just to get the attention of anyone outside the intelligence community. So what did we do? We invaded the wrong country, killed the wrong madman, and too often used the wrong interrogation techniques on the wrong people-all because our leaders lost contact with the truth.

One concern I had while I was working actively in the intelligence community - being someone who had broad access, who was exposed to more reports than average individuals, who had a better understanding of the bigger picture - was that the post - World War II, post - Cold War directions of societies were either broadly authoritarian or [broadly] liberal or libertarian.

One of the things that I've urged the president-elect to do is to develop a strong working relationship with the intelligence community and I think it's important that Congress, on a bipartisan basis.

The U.S. intelligence community is palsied by lawyers. When we were going to capture Osama bin Laden, for example, the lawyers were more concerned with bin Laden's safety and his comfort than they were with the officers charged with capturing him. We had to build an ergonomically designed chair to put him in, special comfort in terms of how he was shackled into the chair. They even worried about what kind of tape to gag him with so it wouldn't irritate his beard. The lawyers are the bane of the intelligence community.

I think that Mr. Snowden raised some legitimate concerns. How he did it was something that did not follow the procedures and practices of our intelligence community. If everybody took the approach that I make my own decisions about these issues, then it would be very hard to have an organized government or any kind of national security system.

Similarly, the press never tested many of the assumptions about WMDs. One of the great myths about the WMD issue is that everybody believed Iraq had them. Well, that's not true. There were a number of people in the intelligence community and the State Department who were skeptical, and many analysts in the Department of Energy were dubious about Iraq's nuclear capability. There were also people like Scott Ritter who were saying quite accurately what was going on.

The intelligence community is very professional, they do their jobs well, they're the best intelligence gatherers in the world. They're dedicated, patriotic Americans. They will work with any president. They want to have a good relationship with every president.

The US intelligence community is deeply allergic to the Freedom of Information Act. It is fair to say that the intelligence community does nearly everything in its power to avoid compliance with the Freedom of Information Act.

The intelligence community, in particular the FBI, have been sounding alarms about this for more than a year. So to argue that suddenly we have to do this because of the San Bernardino case doesn't really pass the straight-face test. I mean, they've been talking about this. And to say, well, it will only apply to this case, that just - that doesn't wash. This is a major piece of public policy.

People sometimes say I broke an oath of secrecy - one of the early charges leveled against me. But it's a fundamental misunderstanding, because there is no oath of secrecy for people who work in the intelligence community. You are asked to sign a civil agreement, called a Standard Form 312, which basically says if you disclose classified information, they can sue you; they can do this, that and the other. And you risk going to jail.

A political decision has been made not to irritate the intelligence community. The spy agencies are really embarrassed, they're really sore - the revelations really hurt their mystique. The last ten years, they were getting the Zero Dark Thirty treatment - they're the heroes. The surveillance revelations bring them back to Big Brother kind of narratives, and they don't like that at all.

We believe, from everything we have been told by the intelligence community, by 12 years of history with Iraq, by the experience of the U.N. inspectors and by other intelligence agencies in other countries that Saddam Hussein had the intention to develop weapons of mass destruction and to have such weapons, and that was a sound judgment which I still believe to this day because he had had them in the past, he'd used them in the past.

The [Barack] Obama administration almost appears as though it is afraid of the intelligence community. They're afraid of death by a thousand cuts - you know, leaks and things like that.

But the technology was accessible, which suggests incompetence on the part of our counterintelligence community and the Clinton Administration, and may in fact rise to the level of treason.

The intelligence community is so vast that more people have top secret clearance than live in Washington. The U.S. will spend more on the war in Afghanistan this year, adjusting for inflation, than we spent on the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War and the Spanish-American War combined.

All officers of the Intelligence Community, and especially its most senior officer, must conduct themselves in a manner that earns and retains the public trust. The American people are uncomfortable with government activities that do not take place in the open, subject to public scrutiny and review.

The intelligence community, for the most part, has no accountability at all; to the Congress, to us the American people, and so they feel that they above the law.