I don't want to be overly dramatic, but Iraq and Syria are gone, and they aren't coming back, at least not as centralized states.
Counterterrorism, counterproliferation, and counterintelligence are staples. The four countries of highest interest - Russia, China, Iran and North Korea - are constants.
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.
There's still a lot of things you can legitimately do to make America safe through electronic surveillance.
Global security can be formed or threatened by heads of state whose wisdom, folly and obsessions shape global events. But often it is the security practitioners, those rarely in the headlines but whose craft and energy quietly break new ground, who keep us safe or put us in peril.
If we are going to conduct espionage in the future, we are going to have to make some changes in the relationship between the intelligence community and the public it serves.
I think the Sino-American relationship is the most important geo-strategic question facing us.
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.
Nothing more threatens Vladimir Putin than not being able to track his own citizens.
My literal responsibility as director of the CIA with regard to covert action was to inform the Congress - not to seek their approval; to inform.
Great weight should be given to the judgment of professionals on what information, if disclosed, would harm national security.
Apple and Google want to create encryption for which they could not provide you the key. Their business model will not survive if the American government has a special relationship with them that requires them to surrender this kind of information.
The Constitution defends all of us against unreasonable search and seizure. What constitutes reasonableness depends upon threat.
The arc of technology is in the direction of unbreakable encryption, and no laws are going to get in the way of that reality.
ThinThread was not the program of record of my predecessor, Ken Minihan, OK. I did not make ThinThread the program of record while I was director. After I left in 2005, Keith Alexander also chose not to make ThinThread the program of record.
'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.
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.
Thoreau points out clearly that civil disobedience gets its moral authority by the willingness to suffer the penalties from disobeying a law, even if you think that law is unjust.
When I was director of the CIA, I knew that we had been - and I'm choosing my words very carefully here - effective in our expansion. We really had - expansion of government agencies and expansion of use of contractors. Effective, we were; efficient, we weren't. And so, as director of the CIA, I went after the inefficiencies part.
