“The Executive must have the largely unshared duty to determine and preserve the degree of internal security necessary to exercise that power successfully. It is an awesome responsibility requiring judgment and wisdom of a high order. A very first principle of that wisdom would be an insistence upon avoiding secrecy for its own sake. For when everything is classified, then nothing is classified and the system becomes one to be disregarded by the cynical or the careless and to be manipulated by those intent on self-protection or self-promotion.”

—  Potter Stewart

Source: Security Classification Reform Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Goverment Operations of the House of Representatives. Ninetythird Congress. Second Session. 1974

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American judge 1915–1985

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