Richard Clarke Quotes

"We want to provide the best possible entertainment for our fans and that means creating a winning team and maximizing their chances of success."

"You may not be aware but in government departments, no one does any work on Friday and most offices are deserted by 2.30pm. Consequently, the OBO team can rest assured they are not throwing sand in the over-oiled mechanism of the civil service."

"There's no iron law. But the law enforcement side, the intelligence side, will always want to eliminate the leadership."

"What people did when they were 18 or 21, I think that is pretty irrelevant. We have to recognize there are a couple of generations now who regarded marijuana use, while it's technically illegal, as nothing more serious than jaywalking."

"The government is willing to be guided by the principle that it won't achieve IT security through regulation. Congress and the federal agencies should be discouraged from trying to craft IT regulation into law."

"I don't agree we've had a failure of intelligence. There's no basis for saying that,"

"You cannot explain failure any more than you can argue with success."

"The real threat in Pakistan, is that someone on the inside, someone in the Pakistani military or intelligence service, might be cooperating with the terrorists. It has happened many times in Pakistan and it is very hard to protect against an inside threat."

"If you put all the unclassified information together, sometimes it adds up to something that ought to be classified."

"You should want the highest form of technology and security for your privacy information, and frankly, we don't have that today."

"What people did when they were 18 or 21, I think that is pretty irrelevant, ... We have to recognize there are a couple of generations now who regarded marijuana use, while it's technically illegal, as nothing more serious than jaywalking."

"People downplay the importance of cyber-security, claiming that no one will ever die in a cyber-attack, but they're wrong. This is a serious threat."

"The only new element in his statement is that they are planning an attack soon on the United States. Would he say that and risk being proved wrong, if he can't pull it off in a month or so?"

"I've talked to a lot of state directors of homeland security, state officials, mayors, heads of big companies, and they all say they don't take it seriously,"

"They don't get good information from [Secretary] Tom Ridge and the Homeland Security people. There's very bad communication, very bad messaging."

"On behalf of President Bush, we invite your involvement in drafting a national plan for information technology security. We in this country continue to be targets, and we have to defend our cyberspace."

"People downplay the importance of cyber-security, claiming that no one will ever die in a cyber-attack, but they're wrong, ... This is a serious threat."

"He probably doesn't have much of an operational capability left. But how much does it take? It took 19 people to do 9/11."

"I don't believe that the IT industry can't solve that problem."

"Now he never said, 'Make it up,' ... But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this."