Political Quotes

“the National Security Agency continues its indiscriminate collection of a massive number of phone records about Americans under section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act. I have said over and over again that as a nation we have long needed to have the national conversation about bulk collection that is now underway, and the section 215 program should have been declassified long before it was. I wish to make very clear, as I have said before, I do not condone the way this or other highly classified programs were disclosed. I am deeply concerned about the potential damage to our intelligence- gathering capabilities, our foreign relationships, and national security. I am also deeply concerned that one person with a security clearance can wreak this much havoc. According to the New York Times, Edward Snowden accomplished his heist of extraordinarily sensitive information about NSA activities with ``inexpensive and widely available software''; in other words, software that any one of us could get. He didn't even execute a particularly sophisticated breach. He did not, apparently, face a particularly complex technological challenge while removing these sensitive documents from the NSA trove. Yet he pulled off what the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper recently called ``the most massive and most damaging theft of intelligence in our history.'' I continually ask the leaders of our intelligence community: What are you doing to stop this from happening again?…”