Michael V. Hayden > Quotes

“It was no accident that the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year in 2016 was “post-truth,” a condition where objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. Liberal British academic and philosopher A. C. Grayling characterized the emerging post-truth world to me as “over-valuing opinion and preference at the expense of proof and data.” Oxford Dictionaries president Casper Grathwohl predicted that the term could become “one of the defining words of our time.”
― Michael V. Hayden, The Assault on Intelligence: American National Security in an Age of Lies

“Nichols credits a 1999 study by Justin Kruger and David Dunning, research psychologists at Cornell, with driving home this point. Nichols writes, “The lack of metacognition sets up a vicious loop in which people who do not know much about a subject do not know when they’re in over their head . . . and there is no way to educate or inform people who, when in doubt, will make stuff up.”
― Michael V. Hayden, The Assault on Intelligence: American National Security in an Age of Lies

“I can’t tell the difference between unlucky and unskilled because the results are the same,”
― Michael V. Hayden, Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror

“The world is not getting any safer, and espionage remains our first line of defense. The”
― Michael V. Hayden, Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror

“In tone, the administration said that the NSS was all about championing America, but I wondered what America that was: the national/nativist state defined by blood, soil, and shared history? Or America the creedal nation, the Madisonian embodiment of Enlightenment ideals? I suspected that it was the former, since the champion, Donald Trump, had already alleged that American elections were “rigged,” three million people had voted illegally (all against him), the seat of government was a “swamp,” the free press was the “enemy of the people,” crime was at record rates, and the American judicial system was a “joke.” In all that, he sounded a lot like an Internet troll on a botnet controlled from Saint Petersburg. Or like Vladimir Putin. Whom he never could quite admit had worked to get him elected. But Putin had. And then some.”
― Michael V. Hayden, The Assault on Intelligence: American National Security in an Age of Lies

“We set up an effort, the Geocell, staffed it with smart young folks, teamed them up with imagery analysts from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), and then wired them directly to tactical units in the field. Old SIGINTers will tell you that this was just a version of what they used to call traffic analysis. If it was, it was on a massive dose of steroids. We put the Geocell in the basement among the heating ducts,”
― Michael V. Hayden, Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror

“Russia, we now know, opted for door number two: information dominance. It was a logical choice for a weak but proud nation, one that could not match the West in the traditional forms of economic or military power. And it was less about matching the West than it was about bringing the West (especially the United States) down to Russia’s level by challenging its confidence in itself and its institutions. And the enabler for all of this was the World Wide Web and social media, the ability to “publish” without credentials, without the need to offer proof (at least in the traditional sense) or even to identify yourself. The demise of a respected media as an arbiter of fact or at least as a curator of data let loose impulses that were at once leveling, coarsening, and misleading. A. C. Grayling, the British philosopher, says that this explosion of information overwhelmed us and happened so quickly that education did not keep up, leaving us, he laments, with regularly reading the biggest washroom wall in history.”
― Michael V. Hayden, The Assault on Intelligence: American National Security in an Age of Lies

“Every nation is required to balance the needs of security with the needs of liberty. Thanks to James Madison and a bunch of his friends, we have planted our flag well on the side of liberty in that difficult question. But if a nation feels itself threatened, feels its children are at risk, it tends to move its banner closer to the requirements of security than those of liberty. That’s what all of us feared when we told our families that we would wake up Wednesday to a different America. You and I have a role here. You and I can and will preserve American liberty and we will do it by making America feel safe again.”
― Michael V. Hayden, Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror