Quotes

[re Edward Snowden] He's not a villain, he's not a spy. He's just a man who saw something that he believed was quite wrong. I salute him for his guts and his courage. And I'm sure there are twenty screenwriters in Hollywood right now trying to track down the rights to his story.

[re Enemy of the State (1998)] When Lucas Foster at Simpson/Bruckheimer brought me in, he said he wanted to do a movie about how a guy gets taken down electronically. Behind him on his office wall was a poster of North by Northwest (1959). So I said, 'All right, 'North by Northwest', a guy is taken down electronically, got it.' I started looking around at possible bogeymen, and I came across this book called 'The Puzzle Palace', by James Bamford, in which he pretty much lays out everything that the NSA is doing now and has done for years. It was a massive eye opener. Anyone who was in any way paying attention to this stuff knew that the NSA was a big vacuum cleaner and that they were storing everything. This has been going on since World War II.

[re Enemy of the State (1998)] The Department of Defense asked me to come down and speak to them after the film came out. I met CIA guys and NSA guys. I found them all to be very professional. They were very focused on the mission and on defending the country. I didn't walk away with a sense that any of them were malevolent. But some of them also had a very myopic view-here's what you do, and you sit at your computer and you do it. What you have is this machine that's self-perpetuating. It starts to grow on its own, and the more power it gets, the more power it wants to assume. And as a result of the Patriot Act and 9/11, that apparatus is looking more and more at what's going on inside this country.