Quotes from Fred Kaplan

Stone was no admirer of Snowden: he valued certain whistleblowers who selectively leaked secret information in the interest of the public good; but Snowden's wholesale pilfering of so many documents, of such a highly classified nature, struck him as untenable. Maybe Snowden was right and the government was wrong—he didn't know—but he thought no national security apparatus could function if some junior employee decided which secrets to preserve and which to let fly.

the lag time between collecting and acting on intelligence was slashed from sixteen hours to one minute. By

WE LIVE IN A CULTURAL CLIMATE QUICK TO ACCEPT THE WORST, DENY the best. And we often have difficulty, unlike Dickens, in being sure about how to define moral indicators, especially in complicated human matters. To Dickens, that came easily. He unhesitatingly believed in absolute truths, both moral and cosmological, though, paradoxically, opposite absolutes often co-exist, as in "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

Notes on the State of Virginia

Some called it the "Super," because it could release 1,000 times as much explosive energy as the atomic bombs that were dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the war. It was a thermonuclear weapon, the hydrogen bomb.

On November 1, the first hydrogen bomb—produced at Los Alamos—was exploded, as part of codeword Operation Ivy, off the Eniwetok atoll in the Pacific. They called the bomb Mike. It exploded with the power of twelve megatons, causing the tiny island of Elugelab, the site of the blast, to vanish from the face of the earth.

One word was floating around in stories about hackings of one sort or another: "cyber." The word had its roots in "cybernetics," a term dating back to the mid-nineteenth century, describing the closed loops of information systems. But in its present-day context of computer networks, the term stemmed from William Gibson's 1984 science-fiction novel, Neuromancer, a wild and eerily prescient tale of murder and mayhem in the virtual world of "cyberspace.

Lookit!" he said, pounding a nearby table. "My job is not to deal with this people thing! My job is to kill the enemy!

NSA lawyers even altered some otherwise plain definitions, so that doing this didn't constitute "collecting" data from American citizens, as that would be illegal: under the new terminology, the NSA was just storing the data; the collecting wouldn't happen until an analyst went to retrieve it from the files, and that would be done only with proper FISA Court approval. Under

Parents owed their children admonition and discipline, not expressive sentiment.

Sneakers was cowritten by Larry Lasker and Walter Parkes—the same pair that, a decade earlier, had written WarGames.

Reading Edmund Morris's 'Colonel Roosevelt' is a rewarding journey, as it must also have been for its author, who concludes his three-volume saga begun in 1980 with publication of 'The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt.'

I first wrote a biography of Thomas Carlyle, and it turned out I loved writing biographies and had a talent for it. I believed I had a contribution to make.

Obama is a very fine writer with an excellent command of language. His memoir 'Dreams From My Father' is a fine book, but it will not rank as one of the great autobiographies.

A recommendation to scholars: Write only one book about Lincoln; give it your best shot, and then move on.

Serious biographies need to have a historical base in facts.

With all due respect to re-enactors, I consider the Civil War too tragic a subject to make a game of.

Lincoln is distinguished from every other president, with the exception of Jefferson, in that we can be certain that he wrote every word to which his name is attached.

The New START accord cuts the strategic nuclear arsenals on each side to 1,550 warheads. Can any of its critics make a case that our security would be imperiled if, the very next day, Obama and Medvedev made moves to take the levels down to 1,000—then to 500? If so, come show us the math. If not, it may be time to stop making arms control so politically complicated—time to stop letting arms control get in the way of disarmament.

As became a young sinner, Sam [Mark Twain] had a special interest in Satan. He asked his Sunday school teacher questions about Eve in the garden, wondering "if he had ever heard of another woman who, being approached by a serpent, would not excuse herself and break for the nearest timber." Twain recalled, "He did not answer my question, but rebuked me for inquiring into matters above my age and comprehension.

We are sent into this world for some end. It is our duty to discover by close study what this end is and when we once discover it to pursue it

Adams had no doubt that education was as much a human birthright as freedom, for females as well as males, for slaves as well as free blacks. Freedom and education were inseparable.

When a director at Pacific Gas & Electric, one of the nation's largest utilities, testified that all of its control systems were getting hooked up to the Internet, to save money and speed up the transmission of energy, Lacombe asked what the company was doing about security. He didn't know what Lacombe was talking about.

Admiral Stephen Decatur's widely publicized toast in 1816, "our country, right or wrong," struck Adams as not only discordant but immoral.