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.
— Michael Hayden
The problem with cyber weapons for a country like ours is the ability to control them.
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.
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.
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.
I don't know if the European Union contributes a great deal to espionage. At the union level, they talk about commerce and privacy. But to keep citizens safe, that remains a responsibility back in national capitals.
I have spent my adult life working in American intelligence. It has been quite an honor. Generally well resourced. A global mission. No want of issues. And it was a hell of a ride.
After the attacks on September 11th, we all learned lessons.
There's a bigger difference between the first and second Bush administrations than there is between Bush and Obama. That's really true.
I think the Sino-American relationship is the most important geo-strategic question facing us.
Xi agreed to the American definition of legitimate espionage. In other words, you don't use the power of the state to steal secrets for profit.
Our inaction created the opportunity for the Russians to reenter the Middle East in a powerful way for the first time since 1973.
There's still a lot of things you can legitimately do to make America safe through electronic surveillance.
If we don't get our relationship with the emerging People's Republic of China right, that is something that could lead to global catastrophe.
The first thing I did after getting a Master's degree - and the Air Force was very kind; they let me stay on at school to get a Master's - I went to Denver for the Armed Forces Air Intelligence School, six months. Fundamentally, we had a major effort on in Southeast Asia, and this was training folks to support that effort.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The attorney general is the only one who can authorize what's called an emergency FISA.
'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.
There is an unarguable downside to unbreakable encryption.
Nothing more threatens Vladimir Putin than not being able to track his own citizens.
Before he played CIA Director Saul Berenson on 'Homeland,' a much younger Mandy Patinkin gained some fame as Inigo Montoya, a legendary swordsman, in 'The Princess Bride.'
There is no worse place for an intelligence service like CIA to be than on Page 1, above the fold in your daily newspaper.
National security looks different from the Oval Office than it does from a hotel room in Iowa.
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.
To be perfectly candid, we're better at stealing other people's secrets than anyone else in the world. But we self-limit. We steal secrets to keep our citizens free and safe.
I must admit, my old tribe is not unanimous on the view I've taken, but there are other folks like me, other former directors of the NSA who have said building in backdoors universally in Apple or other devices actually is bad for America. I think we can all agree it's bad for American privacy.
The arc of technology is in the direction of unbreakable encryption, and no laws are going to get in the way of that reality.
I enjoyed writing in school. I don't know that I was all that good at it in school. I worked at it later. I feel comfortable writing now. I enjoy writing now. I suspect, like most college students, I viewed writing then to be more tedious.
I was an intelligence officer for what was then 8th Air Force, B-52 Air Force.
A writer of fiction lives in fear. Each new day demands new ideas, and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not.
Right after 9/11, I mean, every agency can give their own gradation, but a nice, popular rule of thumb is everybody doubled down. I ended up in NSA with about twice as much money as I had prior to 9/11.
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.
People don't question American power. What people need to be convinced of is American will.
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 Constitution defends all of us against unreasonable search and seizure. What constitutes reasonableness depends upon threat.
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.
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.
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.
I believe we do have a great intelligence service. Is it good enough in all circumstances? Of course not. We live in the human condition. We try to make it better each day.
Most of the 9/11 hijackers weren't married, none of them had families inside the United States, and there's no evidence that any family members moved before, during, or after 9/11.
All enterprises and major players need to pay attention to the needs of the government of the country of which they are a part. At one level, it would be unconscionable for a company like Huawei not to be responsive to Chinese national-security needs.
One of the things that distinguishes the CIA from the State Department is that the CIA is both asked to, and authorized to, steal secrets. So if the question is whether the CIA steals secrets, the answer is yes.
I'm not hugging the Guantanamo location, but our right to hold people under the laws of war as enemy combatants, I think, is unarguable, and we need to stand up for that.
People have a right to privacy, but they also have a right to live. Fundamentally, we need cybersecurity and need to secure communications as well.
My time in war zones have been fleeting and infrequent. I've been to Iraq. I've been to Afghanistan. I've been to other places where I've collected hazardous duty pay.
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.
I'm a career Air Force officer. We have a saying in the Air Force: 'If you want people to be with you at the crash, you've got to put them on the manifest.' And so I was always of the view to almost leave no stone unturned when you're up there briefing the Hill.
