The Constitution defends all of us against unreasonable search and seizure. What constitutes reasonableness depends upon threat.

Our inaction created the opportunity for the Russians to reenter the Middle East in a powerful way for the first time since 1973.

President Obama and his successors are dependent on the 100,000-plus people inside the American intelligence community - the people Edward Snowden betrayed.

This program has been successful in detecting and preventing attacks inside the United States.

Before he played CIA Director Saul Berenson on 'Homeland,' a much younger Mandy Patinkin gained some fame as Inigo Montoya, a legendary swordsman, in 'The Princess Bride.'

It was a long, difficult summer of 2004. That was a leap year, so several things happened - the Olympics and presidential election. And right in the middle of the election campaign - and I don't think this was an accident - the 9/11 Commission delivers its report.

I blame the Russians for a lot, but pinning the creation of ISIS on them is a murky, tenuous, triple-carom bank shot at best.

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

There is no worse place for an intelligence service like CIA to be than on Page 1, above the fold in your daily newspaper.

Counterterrorism, counterproliferation, and counterintelligence are staples. The four countries of highest interest - Russia, China, Iran and North Korea - are constants.

Most of the 9/11 hijackers weren't married, none of them had families inside the United States, and there's no evidence that any family members moved before, during, or after 9/11.

The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that said Iran had paused its nuclear weaponization work also reported with high confidence that such work had been going on through 2003. How far did they get? That's an important question, but I fear that the Iranians will never answer it, and we will not insist that they do.

When I was at the CIA I asked my civilian advisory board to tackle some tough questions. Among the toughest: In a political culture that every day demands more transparency and more public accountability from every aspect of national life, could American intelligence continue to survive and succeed? That jury is still out.

I have spent my adult life working in American intelligence. It has been quite an honor. Generally well resourced. A global mission. No want of issues. And it was a hell of a ride.

I don't know if the European Union contributes a great deal to espionage. At the union level, they talk about commerce and privacy. But to keep citizens safe, that remains a responsibility back in national capitals.

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

We're an organization with a clear objective: to protect the American people. We have a number of missions that feed into that, to protect America, and one of those missions we share with the council, which is to help our policymakers make sense of global events.

I'm a career Air Force officer. We have a saying in the Air Force: 'If you want people to be with you at the crash, you've got to put them on the manifest.' And so I was always of the view to almost leave no stone unturned when you're up there briefing the Hill.

Politicization - the shading of analysis to fit prevailing policy or politics - is the harshest criticism one can make of an intelligence organization. It strikes beyond questions of competence to the fundamental ethic of the enterprise, which is, or should be, truth telling.

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

I've often said that the ISIS-Syria-Iraq mess is about as bad as it could be.

Once you're in a network, you can do a whole bunch of things to that network. It's just that NSA doesn't have the authority to do that.

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

As director of CIA, I was responsible for everything done in the agency's name, and it didn't matter whether that was done by an agency employee, a government contractor, a liaison service on our behalf, or a source on our behalf.

The point I wanted to make was, as we have moved forward on the war on terrorism, FISA has been increasingly effective in terms of results.

Anger can be a useful emotion; it's built into our genetic code to help with self preservation. But it can also be destructive, even when it is justified.

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.

Right after 9/11, I mean, every agency can give their own gradation, but a nice, popular rule of thumb is everybody doubled down. I ended up in NSA with about twice as much money as I had prior to 9/11.

American political elites feel very empowered to criticize the American intelligence community for not doing enough when they feel in danger, and as soon as we've made them feel safe again, they feel equally empowered to complain that we're doing too much.

The first thing I did after getting a Master's degree - and the Air Force was very kind; they let me stay on at school to get a Master's - I went to Denver for the Armed Forces Air Intelligence School, six months. Fundamentally, we had a major effort on in Southeast Asia, and this was training folks to support that effort.

It's good to remind intelligence producers and consumers alike about the need to 'warn of emerging conditions, trends, threats and opportunities' and the potential for discontinuities.

Renditions before and since 9/11 share some basic features. They have been conducted lawfully, responsibly and with a clear and single purpose: Get terrorists off the street and gain intelligence on those still at large. Our detention and interrogation programs flow from the same inescapable logic.

My experience has been that military assessments on 'how goes the war' are consistently more optimistic than those made by the CIA and other agencies.

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 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.

MEMRI counts the federal government as a customer for its analysis, and the MEMRI logo is often visible on the B-roll video of major news networks. Other private firms create their own information rather than tracking that of others.

I told them that free people always had to decide where to draw the line between their liberty and their security. I noted that the attacks would almost certainly push us as a nation more toward security.

An intelligence analyst may attribute an attack to al Qaeda, whereas a policy maker could opt for the more general 'extremist.'

When I was director of the CIA, I knew that we had been - and I'm choosing my words very carefully here - effective in our expansion. We really had - expansion of government agencies and expansion of use of contractors. Effective, we were; efficient, we weren't. And so, as director of the CIA, I went after the inefficiencies part.

Right after 9/11, I mean, every agency can give their own gradation, but a nice, popular rule of thumb is everybody doubled down. I ended up in the NSA with about twice as much money as I had prior to 9/11.

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.'

I was an intelligence officer for what was then 8th Air Force, B-52 Air Force.

I enjoyed writing in school. I don't know that I was all that good at it in school. I worked at it later. I feel comfortable writing now. I enjoy writing now. I suspect, like most college students, I viewed writing then to be more tedious.

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.

There's still a lot of things you can legitimately do to make America safe through electronic surveillance.

I must admit, my old tribe is not unanimous on the view I've taken, but there are other folks like me, other former directors of the NSA who have said building in backdoors universally in Apple or other devices actually is bad for America. I think we can all agree it's bad for American privacy.

To be perfectly candid, we're better at stealing other people's secrets than anyone else in the world. But we self-limit. We steal secrets to keep our citizens free and safe.

Apple and Google want to create encryption for which they could not provide you the key. Their business model will not survive if the American government has a special relationship with them that requires them to surrender this kind of information.

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

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