Michael Hayden

Access to the security clearance database would disgorge even more detailed personal information, including the foreign contacts of American officials.

In the Cold War, a lot of Soviet actions could be explained as extensions of Czarist imperial ambitions, but that didn't stop us from studying Marxism in theory and Communism in practice to better understand that adversary.

A person seeking to be the President of the United States should not suggest violence in any way.

I know of no government official who would welcome an army of inspectors general combing through four years of emails on their unclassified accounts. That's why they use government accounts, where the government remains responsible for security, and they don't mingle personal correspondence with official.

I think the Sino-American relationship is the most important geo-strategic question facing us.

When at the CIA, I was fond of saying that many jihadis join the movement for the same reasons that young Americans join the Crips and the Bloods: youthful alienation, the need to belong to something greater than self, the search for meaningful identity. But it also matters what gang you join.

People have a right to privacy, but they also have a right to live. Fundamentally, we need cybersecurity and need to secure communications as well.

ISIS is a learning enemy, and former Deputy Director of NSA Chris Inglis says that they have gone to school on the documents released by Edward Snowden and have changed their communications practices.

President Obama came to office with a strong belief that America had overreached, that we had become too involved. It matched the national mood, and indeed, there was some evidence that it was true.

In my heart of hearts, I don't think it's a good position to say that Guantanamo is not an acceptable answer for anyone we might capture now or in the future.

The use of these techniques against these terrorists made us safer. It really did work.

All enterprises and major players need to pay attention to the needs of the government of the country of which they are a part. At one level, it would be unconscionable for a company like Huawei not to be responsive to Chinese national-security needs.

There's a bigger difference between the first and second Bush administrations than there is between Bush and Obama. That's really true.

Nothing more threatens Vladimir Putin than not being able to track his own citizens.

I don't want to be overly dramatic, but Iraq and Syria are gone, and they aren't coming back, at least not as centralized states.

I used to have a little saying I used when people said, 'What are your priorities?' I'd give them a bit of government alphabet soup. I'd say 'CTCPROW: Counterterrorism, counterproliferation, rest of the world.'

In my own private-sector work, I have become intrigued with RIWI, a Canadian based company that surveys random respondents on the Web to measure attitudes in otherwise hard-to-reach places.

The problem with cyber weapons for a country like ours is the ability to control them.

The attorney general is the only one who can authorize what's called an emergency FISA.

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.