NSA is a very conservative culture legally. Our lawyers at NSA were notorious for their conservatism up through the morning of September 11th, 2001. The single most consistent criticism of the NSA legal office by our congressional oversight committee was that our legal office was too conservative.Collection: Legal
Anger can be a useful emotion; it's built into our genetic code to help with self preservation. But it can also be destructive, even when it is justified.Collection: Anger
At the end of the 30 Years War then, Europe broadly decided to separate the sacred from the secular in its political culture. I know that is an oversimplification, but it is instructive, and it led to a growth in religious tolerance that has characterized the best of Western life since.Collection: War
American political elites feel very empowered to criticize the American intelligence community for not doing enough when they feel in danger, and as soon as we've made them feel safe again, they feel equally empowered to complain that we're doing too much.Collection: Intelligence
Politicization - the shading of analysis to fit prevailing policy or politics - is the harshest criticism one can make of an intelligence organization. It strikes beyond questions of competence to the fundamental ethic of the enterprise, which is, or should be, truth telling.Collection: Intelligence
When I was at the CIA I asked my civilian advisory board to tackle some tough questions. Among the toughest: In a political culture that every day demands more transparency and more public accountability from every aspect of national life, could American intelligence continue to survive and succeed? That jury is still out.Collection: Intelligence
When asked if I miss being in government, I usually try to lighten the moment by responding that I awake most days, read the paper, and then observe that, 'It's yet another great day to be the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency.'Collection: Intelligence
I was an intelligence officer for what was then 8th Air Force, B-52 Air Force.Collection: Intelligence
There's this movie, 'Zero Dark Thirty' about the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Some have complained that too many 'secrets' were dished out by the intelligence and special operations communities to director Kathryn Bigelow, screenwriter Mark Boal and their crew, part of a broader pattern of using intelligence for political effect.Collection: Intelligence
An intelligence analyst may attribute an attack to al Qaeda, whereas a policy maker could opt for the more general 'extremist.'Collection: Intelligence
There is no part of the executive branch that more exists on the outer edge of executive prerogative than the American intelligence community - the intelligence community, CIA, covert action. My literal responsibility as director of CIA with regard to covert action was to inform the Congress - not to seek their approval, to inform.Collection: Intelligence
The intelligence community is governed by the same legal and ethical standards as the rest of American government and society, but an operational imperative is here, too. An intelligence community charged with global responsibilities cannot be successful without diversity of thought, culture and language.Collection: Legal
As director of CIA, I was responsible for everything done in the agency's name, and it didn't matter whether that was done by an agency employee, a government contractor, a liaison service on our behalf, or a source on our behalf.
The Constitution defends all of us against unreasonable search and seizure. What constitutes reasonableness depends upon threat.
'End strength' - the total number of government employees you can have at the end of the year. That's a separate exercise and requires independent energy, independent effort with the Congress to get the ceiling of your government employees raised.
George Tenet was actually a very strong centralizing force. If you met George by personality, George met with the president six days out of seven: nontrivial attribute inside the federal government. And George was head of the CIA.
Public discussion of how we determine al Qaeda intentions, I just - I can't see how that can do anything but harm the security of the nation.
The attorney general is the only one who can authorize what's called an emergency FISA.
The point I wanted to make was, as we have moved forward on the war on terrorism, FISA has been increasingly effective in terms of results.
People don't question American power. What people need to be convinced of is American will.
Once you're in a network, you can do a whole bunch of things to that network. It's just that NSA doesn't have the authority to do that.
It's hard to brief in the Oval. You know, you can't - no visual aids, hard to roll out something in front of somebody.
The FISA Amendment Act of 2008 actually allows some of the things we were doing under the president's authority only against al Qaeda, it allows them for all legitimate foreign intelligence purposes.
We live inside a democracy, and you know, public will matters in a democracy. I just hope it's informed public will, and frankly, when the decisions are made, you understand the costs.
When I became director of CIA, it was just clear to me intuitively, without a whole lot of science behind it, that we had expanded rapidly and inefficiently. So I arbitrarily picked a number, 10 percent, and I said over the next 12 months, we are going to reduce our reliance on contractors by 10 percent.
Al Qaida changes; Al Qaida adapts. We have to adapt as well. We rely on resources to do that. Reducing resources beyond a certain point will make us less able to adapt as our enemy adapts.
My personal view is that Iran, left to its own devices, will get itself to that step right below a nuclear weapon, that permanent breakout stage, so the needle isn't quite in the red for the international community. And, frankly, that will be as destabilizing as their actually having a weapon.
When I was in government, what we would used to mystically call 'the kinetic option' was way down on our list. In my personal thinking - in my personal thinking, I need to emphasize that - I have begun to consider that that may not be the worst of all possible outcomes.
As much as we might look for opportunities to keep Iraq together, we need to be prepared for the reality that it's not going to stay together.
In my heart of hearts, I don't think it's a good position to say that Guantanamo is not an acceptable answer for anyone we might capture now or in the future.
We're an organization with a clear objective: to protect the American people. We have a number of missions that feed into that, to protect America, and one of those missions we share with the council, which is to help our policymakers make sense of global events.
Our nation counts on us to have the expertise and the insight to flag the risks and the opportunities that lie ahead, and to keep our eye on all the critical international concerns that face our nation right now.
Renditions before and since 9/11 share some basic features. They have been conducted lawfully, responsibly and with a clear and single purpose: Get terrorists off the street and gain intelligence on those still at large. Our detention and interrogation programs flow from the same inescapable logic.
Responsibility demands action, and dealing with the immediate threat must naturally be a top priority.
What Edward Snowden did amounted to the greatest hemorrhaging of legitimate American secrets in the history of my nation.
If Snowden really claims that his actions amounted to genuine civil disobedience, he should go to some English language bookstore in Moscow and get a copy of Henry David Thoreau's 'Civil Disobedience'.
President Obama and his successors are dependent on the 100,000-plus people inside the American intelligence community - the people Edward Snowden betrayed.
Access to the security clearance database would disgorge even more detailed personal information, including the foreign contacts of American officials.
Chairman Chaffetz was an enthusiastic supporter of the 'USA Freedom Act,' designed to rein in the allegedly renegade NSA and its wanton depredations of American privacy.
A significant U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan has been continuous since October 2001, and President Obama's short-lived 'surge' in 2009 was a continuation of his predecessor's buildup there.
President Obama came to office with a strong belief that America had overreached, that we had become too involved. It matched the national mood, and indeed, there was some evidence that it was true.
I've often said that the ISIS-Syria-Iraq mess is about as bad as it could be.
My life experience confirms that the U.S. government frequently overclassifies data. But that's a stronger argument for not dumping large volumes of government traffic on an unclassified personal server than it is a justification for retroactively challenging classification decisions.
I know of no government official who would welcome an army of inspectors general combing through four years of emails on their unclassified accounts. That's why they use government accounts, where the government remains responsible for security, and they don't mingle personal correspondence with official.
Americans are very practical folks. Accustomed to hard choices in their own lives, they are willing to give us in intelligence a lot of slack as we make the hard choices our profession demands.
Dissenting analysts passionate about their positions are not unusual in the American intelligence community. Their presence - or even the rejection - of their favored positions is not prima face evidence of politicization.
Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith was equally insistent in 2002-2003 about an operational relationship between al Qaeda and the Iraqi government.
My experience has been that military assessments on 'how goes the war' are consistently more optimistic than those made by the CIA and other agencies.
The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that said Iran had paused its nuclear weaponization work also reported with high confidence that such work had been going on through 2003. How far did they get? That's an important question, but I fear that the Iranians will never answer it, and we will not insist that they do.
'Islamist terrorism.' The very phrase is contentious. No one wants to make this problem harder by unfairly branding and alienating a quarter of the world's population, and even in this construction, no one should be thinking this means all of Islam or all Muslims.