I've consciously tried not to romanticize anything, especially not intelligence work. I've always said that I've been writing a series of episodic, naturalistic novels. The people just happen to be spies, politicians, civil servants.
Men are at every stage of evolution, from the most barbarous to the most developed; men are found of lofty intelligence, but also of the most unevolved mentality; in one place there is a highly developed and complex civilisation, in another a crude and simple polity.
One of the indictments of civilizations is that happiness and intelligence are so rarely found in the same person.
I think we have a lot in common with classical composers of the 19th century, although I'm not claiming to have their intelligence. They wanted to create a musical explosion, to blow the crowd away.
We cannot expect to keep our nation's secrets secure - or provide meaningful oversight for our intelligence agencies - if proper classification of our country's secrets is as likely as a coin flip.
In the case of someone sharing classified information with foreign intelligence, for example, the FBI could surreptitiously ensure that they are no longer able to obtain sensitive information.
White House leaks of classified information put the lives of U.S. service members, intelligence officers, and civilians at risk. That's why I support a measure passed by the Senate Intelligence Committee to crack down on such leaks.
Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.
The 9/11 Commission strongly recommends that the National Intelligence Director be fully in control of the budget, from developing it to implementing it, to ensuring that the National Intelligence Director has the clout to make decisions.
Some governments choose to cooperate with the United States in intelligence, law enforcement, or military matters. The co-operation is a two-way street. We share intelligence that has helped protect European countries from attack, helping save European lives.
The employer class is less indispensable in the modern organization of industries because the laboring men themselves possess sufficient intelligence to organize into co-operative relation and enjoy the entire benefits of their own labor.
We've done it in intelligence sharing and certain elements of security. There were parts of the department, in fact, that worked very well in Katrina, like the Coast Guard and TSA.
My dad used to say, 'Just because you dress up in a coat and tie, it doesn't influence your intelligence.'
There will come a time when the human race and super intelligence will coexist to create a richer and happier life.
Nobody phrases it this way, but I think that artificial intelligence is almost a humanities discipline. It's really an attempt to understand human intelligence and human cognition.
Think about when a digital business marries up with what I'll call 'digital intelligence.' It is the dawn of a new era about being a 'cognitive' business. When every product, every service, how you run your company can actually have a piece that learns and thinks as part of it, you will be a cognitive business.
Where the stakes are the highest, in the war on terror, we cannot possibly succeed without extraordinary international cooperation. Effective international police actions require the highest degree of intelligence sharing, planning and collaborative enforcement.
Sometimes, the intelligence community does legal collection against a legitimate foreign intelligence target and that target interacts with U.S. persons, against whom our people thus end up collecting information as a collateral matter.
As a digital technology writer, I have had more than one former student and colleague tell me about digital switchers they have serviced through which calls and data are diverted to government servers or the big data algorithms they've written to be used on our e-mails by intelligence agencies.
Journalism, as concerns collecting information, differs little if at all from intelligence work. In my judgment, a journalist's job is very interesting.
