Political Quotes

“could I respond in the most emphatically sympathetic and supportive way to the statement of the Senator from Texas. In 1993, this Congress passed legislation to create the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy in the United States. We had a fine commission. Senator Helms and I represented the Senate, and in the House, Larry Combest and Lee Hamilton, and John Deutch of the CIA. The commission came up with a unanimous finding. We began with the proposition--and I can say to a fellow academic; he will recognize it--Max Weber set forth that secrecy is the natural weapon of a bureaucracy against the parliament and against the other agencies of the political system. We found the most extraordinary things. I later wrote about this. In December 1946, a brilliant crypto analyst at Arlington Hall Girl's School, not far from the Pentagon, and broke the first of the Soviet KGB codes. These are one-time pads. You ``can't break them'' but they got a little careless, used once or twice. There were the names of all the physicists at Los Alamos, the principal ones. A measure of the extent of the KGB operation in this country? As our crypto analyst worked along, an Army corporal cipher clerk handing him pencils, coffee, whatever, an Army corporal cipher clerk, a KGB spy. In very short order, the KGB knew we were breaking their code.…”