Barton Gellman Quotes
-
Obama's ascendancy unhinged the radical right, offering a unified target to competing camps of racial, nativist and religious animus.
-
A national security letter cannot be used to authorize eavesdropping or to read the contents of e-mail. But it does permit investigators to trace revealing paths through the private affairs of a modern digital citizen.
-
The U.S. government has known since the early 1990s about Soviet-era smallpox weapons, and collected circumstantial evidence of programs elsewhere.
-
The CIA now assesses that four nations - Iraq, North Korea, Russia and, to the surprise of some specialists, France - have undeclared samples of the smallpox virus.
-
If you do write down your passwords, don't make it obvious which password corresponds to which account. Even better, write the passwords incorrectly and make up an easy rule for fixing them. You could decide to add 1 to each number in your password, so that 2x6Y is written as 3x7Y.
-
The NSA is forbidden to 'target' American citizens, green-card holders or companies for surveillance without an individual warrant from a judge.
-
The National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008, according to an internal audit and other top-secret documents.
-
The NSA's business is 'information dominance,' the use of other people's secrets to shape events.
-
Activists and geeks, standing together, are demonstrating powers beyond the reach of government control.
-
The U.N. Security Council ordered Iraq in April 1991 to relinquish all capabilities to make biological, chemical and nuclear weapons as well as long-range missiles.
-
Leaders at the top of al Qaeda's hierarchy, the evidence shows, completed plans and obtained the materials required to manufacture two biological toxins - botulinum and salmonella - and the chemical poison cyanide.
-
U.S. surveillance of Pakistan extends far beyond its nuclear program. There are several references in the black budget to expanding U.S. scrutiny of chemical and biological laboratories.
-
On average, since 9/11, the FBI reckons that just over 100,000 terrorism leads each year have come over the transom. Analysts and agents designate them as immediate, priority or routine, but the bureau says every one is covered.
-
Snowden is an orderly thinker, with an engineer's approach to problem-solving.
-
In late 2003, the Bush administration reversed a long-standing policy requiring agents to destroy their files on innocent American citizens, companies and residents when investigations closed.
-
Daniel Ellsberg showed tremendous courage back in the '70s.
-
In effect, you cannot stop Iraq from growing nasty bugs in the basement. You can stop them from putting operational warheads on working missiles and launching them at their neighbors.
-
The funny thing is that Dick Cheney has done more than anybody in the White House for quite a long time to throw up roadblocks against future historians.
-
Snowden grants that NSA employees by and large believe in their mission and trust the agency to handle the secrets it takes from ordinary people - deliberately, in the case of bulk records collection, and 'incidentally,' when the content of American phone calls and e-mails are swept into NSA systems along with foreign targets.
-
Well-secured files don't do you much good if you lose them in a fire or hard drive crash.
-
The causes and severity of NSA infractions vary widely. One in 10 incidents is attributed to a typographical error in which an analyst enters an incorrect query and retrieves data about U.S phone calls or emails.
-
Iraq has, in effect, one export of any consequence. That's oil.
-
The defection of Hussein Kamel was a turning point in the U.N.-imposed disarmament of Iraq in the 1990s.
-
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.