National Security Agency Quotes & Sayings

It strains credulity to suggest that an agency charged with gathering intelligence affecting the national security does not have an 'intelligence interest' in drone strikes, even if that agency does not operate the drones itself. — Merrick Garland

We need to put the security back in the National Security Agency. We can't have the national surveillance agency. — Edward Snowden

Obama's respect for the Constitution does not apply to protections against unreasonable search and seizure, as Obama's deeply intrusive National Security Agency programs prove. — Ben Shapiro

Critics have stepped up their attacks on the President for authorizing the National Security Agency to listen to international communications of known al Qaeda members or affiliated terrorists during a time of war. The American people expect their leaders to stay a step ahead of the enemy, and the National Security Agency authorization is a critical tool in the War on Terror that saves lives and protects civil liberties at the same time. — Scott McClellan

According to a former drone operator for the military's Joint Special Operations Command, the National Security Agency often identifies targets for drone strikes based on controversial metadata analysis and cell phone tracking technologies - an unreliable tactic that results in the deaths of innocent or unidentified people. Rather than confirming a target's identity with operatives or informants on the ground, the CIA or the U.S. military orders a strike based on the activity and location of the mobile phone a person is believed to be using. — Jeremy Scahill

I was initially recruited while I was in business school back in the late sixties by the National Security Agency, the nation's largest and least understood spy organization; but ultimately I worked for private corporations. — John Perkins

I'm fascinated by power, especially veiled power. Shadow power. The National Security Agency. The National Reconnaissance Office. Opus Dei. The idea that everything happens for reasons we're not quite seeing. — Dan Brown

In America, you have the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act. You've got drones now being considered for domestic surveillance. You have the National Security Agency building the world's giantest spy center. — Heather Brooke

The National Security Agency's capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide. If a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A. could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back. — Frank Church

USA Freedom Actdid, however, take away a valuable tool that allowed the National Security Agency and other law - and other intelligence agencies to quickly and rapidly access phone records and match them up with other phone records to see who terrorists have been calling. — Marco Rubio

What the Agency [CIA] does is ordered by the President and the NSC [National Security Council]. The Agency neither makes decisions on policy nor acts on its own account. It is an instrument of the President. — Philip Agee

The director of the National Security Agency, General Michael V. Hayden, had told tens of thousands of his officers in a video message: "We are going to keep America free by making Americans feel safe again. — Tim Weiner

Given the incredible power that new technologies give both governments and terrorists we need a strong American Civil Liberties Union and a strong National Security Agency. In a cyberage, you should want an A.C.L.U. watching the watchers. But you should also want an N.S.A. watching the superempowered, cyberempowered angry people. Civil liberties absolutists may think the 9/11 era is over, but do the jihadist fanatics who use Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp as their command and control system? We need to worry about Big Terrorist and Big Criminal as much as Big Brother if we want to prevent another 9/11. — Anonymous

Under the leadership of Henry Kissinger, first as Richard Nixon's national security adviser and later as secretary of state, the United States sent an unequivocal signal to the most extreme rightist forces that democracy could be sacrificed in the cause of ideological warfare. Criminal operational tactics, including assassination, were not only acceptable but supported with weapons and money. A CIA internal memo laid it out in unsparing terms: On September 16, 1970 [CIA] Director [Richard] Helms informed a group of senior agency officers that on September 15, President Nixon had decided that an Allende regime was not acceptable to the United States. The President asked the Agency to prevent Allende from coming to power or to unseat him and authorized up to $10 million for this purpose. . . . A special task force was established to carry out this mandate, and preliminary plans were discussed with Dr. Kissinger on 18 September 1970. — John Dinges

When the National Security Agency recruited me, they put me through a day of lie detector tests. They found out all my weaknesses and immediately seduced me. They used the strongest drugs in our culture, sex, power and money, to win me over. — John Perkins

We've seen a departure from the traditional work of the National Security Agency. They've become sort of the national hacking agency, the national surveillance agency. And they've lost sight of the fact that everything they do is supposed to make us more secure as a nation and a society. — Edward Snowden

It's becoming less and less the National Security Agency and more and more the national surveillance agency. It's gaining more offensive powers with each passing year. — Edward Snowden

The National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008, according to an internal audit and other top-secret documents. — Barton Gellman

Some say Edward Snowden is a hero and a patriot. Others say he's a fool and a traitor. The evidence is mounting that the guy who leaked the details about the National Security Agency's Internet-eavesdropping program may be something more sinister - namely, a willing tool in China's ongoing cyberwar against our nation. — Arthur L. Herman

So, in 1993, in what was probably the first salvo of the first Crypto War, there was concern coming from the National Security Agency and the FBI that encryption would soon be incorporated into lots of communications devices, and that that would cause wiretaps to go dark. There was not that much commercial use of encryption at that point. Encryption, particularly for communications traffic, was mostly something done by the government. — Matt Blaze

described the relatively low number of fatalities as a miracle.1 President Bill Clinton ordered his National Security Council to coordinate the response. Government agencies swung into action to find the culprits.The Counterterrorist Center located at the CIA combed its files and queried sources around the world. The National Security Agency (NSA), the huge Defense Department signals collection agency, ramped up its communications intercept network and searched its databases for clues.2 The New York Field Office of the FBI took control of the local investigation and, in the end, set a pattern for future management of terrorist incidents. Four features of this episode have significance for the story of 9/11. 71 — Anonymous

The attorney general also spelled out some of the authorities the FBI would use under the Patriot Act, which passed the Senate that same day: capturing e-mail addresses, tapping cell phones, opening voice-mails, culling credit card and bank account numbers from the Internet. All of this would be done under law, he said, with subpoenas and search warrants. But the Patriot Act was not enough for the White House. On October 4, Bush commanded the National Security Agency to work with the FBI in a secret program code-named Stellar Wind. The — Tim Weiner

Just because you're 40, you don't have to decide whether God exists ... when you're already worrying that the National Security Agency is reading your emails, it's better not to know whether yet another entity is watching you. — Pamela Druckerman

President Bush even authorized the National Security Agency to monitor -
without preclearance from a judge - phone calls
and e-mails of U.S. citizens. In — Todd Donovan

I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency [the National Security Agency] and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return. - Senator Frank Church (1975) — Peter Dale Scott

Contrary to repeated claims from President Obama and the NSA, it is already clear that a substantial number of the agency's activities have nothing to do with antiterrorism efforts or even with national security. — Glenn Greenwald

If you expose what it is that we're doing, if you inform your fellow citizens about all the things that we're doing in the dark, we will destroy you. This is what their spate of prosecutions of whistleblowers have [sic] been about. It's what trying to threaten journalists, to criminalize what they do, is about. It's to create a climate of fear, so that nobody will bring accountability to them.
It's not going to work. I think it's starting to backfire, because it shows their true character and exactly why they can't be trusted to operate with power in secret. And we're certainly not going to be deterred by it in any way. The people who are going to be investigated are not the people reporting on this, but are people like Dianne Feinstein and her friends in the National Security Agency, who need investigation and transparency for all the things that they've been doing. — Glenn Greenwald

Obama was particularly offended, as he put it, that "the National Security Agency has been spying on Americans without judicial approval." Justifying — Jeremy Scahill