Barton Gellman Govern Quotations

Snowden has yet to tell me anything that was a fact that I have been able to rebut or that anybody in the U.S. government I have talked to has been able to rebut.

Doctrines don't govern policy. They provide a conceptual framework by which policymakers approach their decisions. But there is no such thing as a doctrine that controls policy in every way.

The federal government is often said in militia circles to have made wholesale seizures of power, at times by subterfuge. A leading grievance holds that the 16th Amendment, which authorizes the federal income tax, was ratified through fraud.

Companies that receive government information demands have to obey the law, but they often have room for maneuver. They scarcely ever use it.

Unsettling signs of al Qaeda's aims and skills in cyberspace have led some government experts to conclude that terrorists are at the threshold of using the Internet as a direct instrument of bloodshed.

The government of Sudan, employing a back channel direct from its president to the Central Intelligence Agency, offered in the early spring of 1996 to arrest Osama bin Laden and place him in Saudi custody, according to officials and former officials in all three countries.

Among all the upheavals of war with al Qaeda, the surest indicator of the historic stakes is the ongoing rotation of top U.S. government managers - scores at a time - into a bunker deep underground and far from Washington.

Holding our own government to account for the use of its power is, in my view, the highest mission of a U.S. news organization.

Governors normally have jurisdiction over public health emergencies, but a widespread biological attack would cross state boundaries.

The NSA has different reporting requirements for each branch of government and each of its legal authorities.

I doubt there's any government in the world that guides itself primarily by strategy or conceptual documents or worldview. Anybody who has the reins of power has to look at practical limitations and tradeoffs - the fact that you can focus at most on one or two things at a time, that resources are limited.

Cloud services cut both ways in terms of security: you get off-site backup and disaster recovery, but you entrust your secrets to somebody else's hands. Doing the latter increases your exposure to government surveillance and the potential for deliberate or inadvertent breaches of your confidential files.

Activists and geeks, standing together, are demonstrating powers beyond the reach of government control.

Nearly all government advice on terrorism sacrifices practical particulars for an unalarming tone. The usual guidance is to maintain a three-day supply of food and water along with a radio, flashlight, batteries and first-aid kit.

The U.S. government has known since the early 1990s about Soviet-era smallpox weapons, and collected circumstantial evidence of programs elsewhere.