Quotes About Secrecy

I guess I've always been attracted to secret societies and the mystery surrounding them.

Everybody calls everybody a spy, secretly, in Russia, and everybody is under surveillance. You never feel safe.

I can't in good conscience allow the U.S. government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building.

Surveillance changes history. We know this through examples of corrupt presidents like Nixon.

Keep under strict surveillance and control those secret establishments which, within your government structures, seem to regard themselves as above the law.

Although the organizing logic of our nation's surveillance apparatus is invisibility and secrecy, its operations occupy the physical world.

I've always been discreet - more than discreet. When a friend calls, and I'm doing something innocuous like cooking dinner, I tell them I'm reading or running out to the movies. It's the surveillance I can't stand.

I do probably come down a little hard on a group of people I call the 'blue chip gays.' I mean people who have managed to become very, very famous and are still very famous partly through staying in the closet, like Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Susan Sontag, Harold Brodkey and others.

I do suspect that privacy was a passing fad.

In the West, anything that must be hidden is suspect; availability and honesty are interlinked. This clashes irreconcilably with Islam, where the things that are most precious, most perfect and most holy are always hidden: the Kaaba, the faces of prophets and angels, a woman's body, Heaven.

According to my mother, positively no one, least of all herself, had even the faintest suspicion that she was heavy with child at the time of my birth.

Apparently only a third of us know our partners phone PIN, so the majority of people keep it secret. I find that really surprising, I think if my husband's PIN was secret I'd be so suspicious of what he was hiding.

The Pirate Bay is not in Sweden. It's a distributed system. We don't know where the servers are. We gave them to people we trust and they don't know it's The Pirate Bay.

The CIA could not face up to the American people and admit that its former employees had conspired to assassinate the President; so from the moment Kennedy's heart stopped beating, the Agency attempted to sweep the whole conspiracy under the rug.

It's interesting that Swiss banks also hide their assets from the Swiss by using offshore bank structuring.

Once, in third grade, we switched classes and nobody knew until our mother stepped in.

Mysteries, like the Masonic rites, are ones parents and elders are sworn not to reveal to the uninitiated, which include all children. And so we sought for signs.

Leaks are not the problem; they are the symptom. They reveal a disconnect between what people want and need to know and what they actually do know. The greater the secrecy, the more likely a leak.

Secrecy, being an instrument of conspiracy, ought never to be the system of a regular government.

Being a Secret Service agent, I have an obligation not to disclose personal conversations and security details. But that doesn't prevent me from speaking generally about foundational principles and the system of patronage and punishment I saw in the Obama administration.

I was in the CIA for nine years. I am intimately familiar with the information classification system. I used it every day on the job. Like every other one of my colleagues at the agency, I approached the handling of classified information with immense care because I understand the ramifications.

Private communication systems have been around since the beginning of human culture.

It is a fairly open secret that almost all systems can be hacked, somehow. It is a less spoken of secret that such hacking has actually gone quite mainstream.

Without going into any details, he