Quotes About Intelligence Agency

“The Central Intelligence Agency, America's best-known spy shop. In that fearful post-Joe McCarthy era, when assassinated JFK had publicly loved James Bond and secretly been entangled in covert intrigues like assassination plots against Cuba's Fidel Castro outsourced to the Mafia by our spies, the CIA was a myth-shrouded invisible army. In those pre-Internet days before electronic books, Web sites with varied credibility, and search”

— James Grady

“Bilderberg pulls the strings of every government and intelligence agency in the Western world.”

— James Morcan

“We are the silent, the misunderstood and the maligned. We are Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency.”

— Khalid Muhammad

“We should not expect individuals to produce good, open-minded, truth-seeking reasoning, particularly when self-interest or reputational concerns are in play. But if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system. This is why it's so important to have intellectual and ideological diversity within any group or institution whose goal is to find truth (such as an intelligence agency or a community of scientists) or to produce good public policy (such as a legislature or advisory board).”

— Jonathan Haidt

“Because of the economies of scale in data, the cloud giants are increasingly powerful. And because they're so susceptible to regulation, these companies have a vested interest in keeping government entities happy. When the Justice Department requested billions of search records from AOL, Yahoo, and MSN in 2006, the three companies quickly complied. (Google, to its credit, opted to fight the request.) Stephen Arnold, an IT expert who worked at consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, says that Google at one point housed three officers of "an unnamed intelligence agency" at its headquarters in Mountain View. And Google and the CIA have invested together in a firm called Recorded Future, which focuses on using data connections to predict future real-world events.”

— Eli Pariser

“This is systems security for the Central Intelligence Agency. We would like to know why you are attempting to hack one of our classified databases.”

— Dan Brown

“Founded by President Truman at 12:01 A.M. on November 4, 1952, the NSA had been the most clandestine intelligence agency in the world for almost fifty years. The NSA's seven-page inception doctrine laid out a very concise agenda: to protect U.S. government communications and to intercept the communications of foreign powers.
The roof of the NSA's main operations building was littered with over five hundred antennas, including two large radomes that looked like enormous golf balls. The building itself was mammoth
over two million square feet, twice the size of CIA headquarters. Inside were eight million feet of telephone wire and eighty thousand square feet of permanently sealed windows.”

— Dan Brown

“Paranoia has its downsides as an agency in daily life, or in the political sphere of collective action, which finds itself beset everywhere by the nightmarish influence of conspiracy thinking (they call it theory, but theories exist to be tested, and conspiracy thinking exists never to be tested, and globally ignores the results of tests imposed by others). The suspicion that malign operators are responsible for every one of the injustices and heartbreaks of existence is a consoling view, a balm to bleak glimpses of the void behind our reality. It's brave to pursue truth, and brave to pursue and expose tricky and well-hidden bad guys (Nazi doctors, Pentagon intelligence-distorters, etc.). It's not brave to think tricky, well-hidden bad guys are the whole truth of what's out there. It might even be bravery's opposite. Or maybe it should go under the name religion.”

— Jonathan Lethem

“What then is this harmony, this order that you maintain to have required for its establishment, what it needs not for its maintenance, the agency of a supernatural intelligence? Inasmuch as the order visible in the Universe requires one cause, so does the disorder whose operation is not less clearly apparent demand another. Order and disorder are no more than modifications of our own perceptions of the relations which subsist between ourselves and external objects, and if we are justified in inferring the operation of a benevolent power from the advantages attendant on the former, the evils of the latter bear equal testimony to the activity of a malignant principle, no less pertinacious in inducing evil out of good, than the other is unremitting in procuring good from evil.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

“I have been a systems engineer, systems administrator, a senior adviser for the Central Intelligence Agency, a solutions consultant and a telecommunications information systems officer.”

— Edward Snowden

“Prior to the passage of the Patriot Act, it was very difficult - often impossible - for us to share information with the Central Intelligence Agency, with NSA, with the other intelligence agencies, and likewise, for them to share information with us.”

— Robert Mueller

“Yes; we have a specific procedure which we follow in all cases where the Agency is in contact, for the purposes of acquiring intelligence or whatever the case may be, with an individual.”

— Richard M. Helms

“This also turned out to be negative, so there is no material in the Central Intelligence Agency, either in the records or in the mind of any of the individuals, that there was any contact had or even contemplated with him.”

— Richard M. Helms

“Well look, CIA is an agency that has to collect intelligence, do operations. We have to take risks and it's important that we take risks and that we know that we have the support of the government and we have the support of the American people in what we're doing.”

— Leon Panetta

“I had been involved in U.S. intelligence in Berlin, Germany, while in the military and had worked with a contact with the Central Intelligence Agency office there.”

— George J. Mitchell

“When I came to the CIA in the mid-'90s, our graduating class of case officers was unbelievably low. Now, after years of rebuilding, our training programs and putting our best efforts to recruit the most talented men and women, we are graduating more clandestine officers than at any time in the history of the Central Intelligence Agency.”

— George Tenet

“Stuxnet, Duqu and Flame are not normal, everyday malware, of course. All three of them were most likely developed by a Western intelligence agency as part of covert operations that weren't meant to be discovered. The fact that the malware evaded detection proves how well the attackers did their job.”

— Mikko Hypponen

“I never would have agreed to the formulation of the Central Intelligence Agency back in forty-seven, if I had known it would become the American Gestapo.”

— Harry Truman

“How can faceless bureaucrats in an intelligence agency deny brave soldiers a chance to tell the truth?”

— Curt Weldon

“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

“Every intelligence agency in the world believed that Saddam Hussein had had weapons of mass destruction, precursor chemicals. The inspectors, over a period of ten years, had managed to gain access to much of those precursor chemicals.”

— John Reid

“The Agency was the one subject in his life that could never be exhausted. Central Intelligence. Beryl saw it as the best organized church in the Christian world, a mission to collect and store everything that everyone has ever said and then reduce it to a microdot and call it God.”

— Don DeLillo

“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 government of Sudan, employing a back channel direct from its president to the Central Intelligence Agency, offered in the early spring of 1996 to arrest Osama bin Laden and place him in Saudi custody, according to officials and former officials in all three countries.”

— Barton Gellman

“Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.”

— Raymond Chandler

“Seventy-two moves to a draw, a prize specimen of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object, a battle without armor, a war without blood, and as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency.”

— Raymond Chandler

“Foreigners who speak Arabic in the Middle East are often assumed to be working for the C.I.A. or Israel's intelligence agency, the Mossad.”

— Richard Engel

“The ISI is above all a paramilitary organization. It doesn't do all that much collection of intelligence. It's not a very good spy agency, but it's good at running covert action.”

— David Ignatius

“The truth was, neither the Central Intelligence Agency nor any of the other official and unofficial U.S. intelligence organizations have ever been some kind of all-seeing, all-knowing, global illuminati. For starters, we never hand that kind of funding.”

— Max Brooks

“[I will] totally dismantle every intelligence agency in this country piece by piece, nail by nail, brick by brick”

— Ron Dellums

“In 1975 a Senate committee headed by Frank Church found that the [Central Intelligence] Agency had planned a number of assassination operations, using everything from poison to machine guns and sometimes mob hit men”

— Jim Garrison

“Yale has influenced the Central Intelligence Agency more than any other university, giving the CIA the atmosphere of a class reunion.”

— Gaddis Smith

“The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media.”

— William Colby

“John Howard's credibility on the entire Iraq war has been torpedoed by John Howard's own intelligence agency.”

— Kevin Rudd

“Free agency is a gift of God ... The world does not comprehend the significance of that divine gift to the individual. It is as inherent as intelligence which, we are told, has never been nor can be created”

— David O. McKay

“FAITH is the only agency through which the cosmic force of Infinite Intelligence can be harnessed and used by man.”

— Napoleon Hill

“Since when is the intelligence agency supposed to be an air force of drones that goes around killing people? I believe that it's a job for the Department of Defense.”

— John McCain

“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

“If a regular law enforcement agency wants your phone records, all they have to do is issue a subpoena. But now the intelligence agency is not able to quickly gather records and look at them to see who these terrorists are calling.”

— Marco Rubio