There is an unarguable downside to unbreakable encryption.
The question is how much of your privacy and your convenience and your commerce do you want your nation's security apparatus to squeeze in order to keep you safe? And it is a choice that we have to make.
Our inaction created the opportunity for the Russians to reenter the Middle East in a powerful way for the first time since 1973.
Intelligence is often viewed as a profession that steals secrets and then knits those secrets together for policymakers in order to inform their judgments.
The point I wanted to make was, as we have moved forward on the war on terrorism, FISA has been increasingly effective in terms of results.
The first thing I did after getting a Master's degree - and the Air Force was very kind; they let me stay on at school to get a Master's - I went to Denver for the Armed Forces Air Intelligence School, six months. Fundamentally, we had a major effort on in Southeast Asia, and this was training folks to support that effort.
As much as we might look for opportunities to keep Iraq together, we need to be prepared for the reality that it's not going to stay together.
When I was at the CIA I asked my civilian advisory board to tackle some tough questions. Among the toughest: In a political culture that every day demands more transparency and more public accountability from every aspect of national life, could American intelligence continue to survive and succeed? That jury is still out.
I don't know if the European Union contributes a great deal to espionage. At the union level, they talk about commerce and privacy. But to keep citizens safe, that remains a responsibility back in national capitals.
My time in war zones have been fleeting and infrequent. I've been to Iraq. I've been to Afghanistan. I've been to other places where I've collected hazardous duty pay.
The arc of technology is in the direction of unbreakable encryption, and no laws are going to get in the way of that reality.
It's hard to brief in the Oval. You know, you can't - no visual aids, hard to roll out something in front of somebody.
ThinThread was not the program of record of my predecessor, Ken Minihan, OK. I did not make ThinThread the program of record while I was director. After I left in 2005, Keith Alexander also chose not to make ThinThread the program of record.
Before he played CIA Director Saul Berenson on 'Homeland,' a much younger Mandy Patinkin gained some fame as Inigo Montoya, a legendary swordsman, in 'The Princess Bride.'
My experience has been that military assessments on 'how goes the war' are consistently more optimistic than those made by the CIA and other agencies.
The FISA Amendment Act of 2008 actually allows some of the things we were doing under the president's authority only against al Qaeda, it allows them for all legitimate foreign intelligence purposes.
The attorney general is the only one who can authorize what's called an emergency FISA.
As director of CIA, I was responsible for everything done in the agency's name, and it didn't matter whether that was done by an agency employee, a government contractor, a liaison service on our behalf, or a source on our behalf.
The Constitution defends all of us against unreasonable search and seizure. What constitutes reasonableness depends upon threat.
I believe we do have a great intelligence service. Is it good enough in all circumstances? Of course not. We live in the human condition. We try to make it better each day.
