69 Quotes by Benjamin Wittes

Recommended additon to the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights: “A right to not have your data rise up and attack you.”

Asking journalists to denounce leaks because of their deleterious effects on the functioning of government is as hopeless as asking an airline to denounce jet fuel because of its impact on the environment.

You cannot denude the presidency of the substance and power of its office. It can't be done.

The difference between a cult and a religion, of course, lies in extremity.

The quickest way to detect a cult is to sniff for doublethink. The cult seeks control over its membership not by providing a coherent theological system but by providing the opposite: an unstable theology infinitely malleable to the needs of the cult's top echelon and uninterpretable at all times to anyone below that level.

Reasonable people can disagree about the authorities the NSA should have, when it's appropriate for the CIA to use drone strikes, and how assertive U.S. foreign policy and intelligence should be.

Good intelligence analysis, after all, is all about discrimination between what's important and what's not.

I was much less offended than others were by the CIA's interrogations in the years after September 11.

While I oppose the death penalty as a policy matter, in a legal culture in which we reserve the right to execute people for relatively routine street crimes, it seems quite absurd for the justice system to get squeamish about executing the operational masterminds of Sept. 11.