Michael Hayden

Access to the security clearance database would disgorge even more detailed personal information, including the foreign contacts of American officials.

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.

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.

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.

The question is how much of your privacy and your convenience and your commerce do you want your nation\'s security apparatus to squeeze in order to keep you safe? And it is a choice that we have to make.

In the Cold War, a lot of Soviet actions could be explained as extensions of Czarist imperial ambitions, but that didn\'t stop us from studying Marxism in theory and Communism in practice to better understand that adversary.

When at the CIA, I was fond of saying that many jihadis join the movement for the same reasons that young Americans join the Crips and the Bloods: youthful alienation, the need to belong to something greater than self, the search for meaningful identity. But it also matters what gang you join.

President Obama and his successors are dependent on the 100,000-plus people inside the American intelligence community - the people Edward Snowden betrayed.

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.

CIA relies on a partner\'s focus, linguistic agility, and cultural depth; in return, the partner benefits from CIA\'s resources, technology, and global view.

One might oppose the CIA program, but Abu Ghraib it ain\'t.

Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith was equally insistent in 2002-2003 about an operational relationship between al Qaeda and the Iraqi government.

The Constitution defends all of us against unreasonable search and seizure. What constitutes reasonableness depends upon threat.

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.

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.

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.

Intelligence collection is not confined to the communications of adversaries or of the guilty. Rather, it\'s about gaining information otherwise unavailable that would help keep Americans safe and free.

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.

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\'.

The attorney general is the only one who can authorize what\'s called an emergency FISA.

When the intelligence is making a policymaker too happy, he ought to challenge it, and even if he doesn\'t, the intelligence briefer needs to launch a red team against his own conclusions to see if he can hold his ground.

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.

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.

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.

Intelligence is often viewed as a profession that steals secrets and then knits those secrets together for policymakers in order to inform their judgments.

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.

Great weight should be given to the judgment of professionals on what information, if disclosed, would harm national security.

A person seeking to be the President of the United States should not suggest violence in any way.

MEMRI counts the federal government as a customer for its analysis, and the MEMRI logo is often visible on the B-roll video of major news networks. Other private firms create their own information rather than tracking that of others.

In my own private-sector work, I have become intrigued with RIWI, a Canadian based company that surveys random respondents on the Web to measure attitudes in otherwise hard-to-reach places.