After the Berlin Wall came down I visited that city and I will never forget it. The abandoned checkpoints. The sense of excitement about the future. The knowledge that a great continent was coming together. Healing those wounds of our history is the central story of the European Union.
2012 has been an extraordinary year for our country. We cheered our Queen to the rafters with the Jubilee, showed the world what we're made of by staging the most spectacular Olympic and Paralympic Games ever and - let's not forget - punched way above our weight in the medals table.
But we will say something else. That for far too long in this country, people who can work, people who are able to work, and people who choose not to work: you cannot go on claiming welfare like you are now.
Britain is characterized not just by its independence but, above all, by its openness.
On the one hand we have got to ask, are there some areas of universal benefits that are no longer affordable? But on the other hand let us look at the issue of dependency where we have trapped people in poverty through the extent of welfare that they have.
I know the British people and they are not passengers - they are drivers.
At a time when we're having to take such difficult decisions about how to cut back without damaging the things that matter the most, we should strain every sinew to cut error, waste and fraud.
I mean, I'm a conservative. I believe that, you know, if you borrow too much, you just build up debts for your children to pay off. You put pressure on interest rates. You put at risk your economy. That's the case in Britain. We're not a reserve currency, so we need to get on and deal with this issu
We spend billions of pounds on welfare, yet millions are trapped on welfare. It's not worth their while going into work.
Half a century ago, the amazing courage of Rosa Parks, the visionary leadership of Martin Luther King, and the inspirational actions of the civil rights movement led politicians to write equality into the law and make real the promise of America for all her citizens.
Where we have the choice between putting a dollar against those that are going to advance horizontal integration and those that are going to sustain current capability, we'd rather put them against the horizontal integration activity.
When you live in a networked environment, it's possible to separate data from applications.
We've complemented that with a second office to think about how we need to prepare ourselves for that period 10 or 15 or 20 years from now, by way of investment in our technology, our organization and our people.
We have been working hard to think about what our combined needs are going to be in the way of intelligence capabilities, not today but 15 to 20 years in the future.
Thirdly, as we move through this process of integrating the communications, we will begin to emulate more of the World Wide Web in our work in the future.
There is a reasonable concern that posting raw data can be misleading for those who are not trained in its use and who do not have the broader perspective within which to place a particular piece of data that is raw.
The users are not going to be in the position of accepting what's been collected; they're going to be in the position of being able to demand collection.
The third group is focused on counterintelligence and security. I think the reason for that is fairly evident, in terms of vulnerabilities of the department and the harm that can come to it by failing to detect when we have, in fact, been harmed.
The office has oversight of people who do analysis and oversight of people who do operations, but it is not charged with doing either. That is an important point to make. Those functions are performed by the CIA, DIA and other agencies.
That's driven by any number of factors, the most prominent of which have been the combat experience of two major campaigns - one in Afghanistan and the other in Iraq - and the ongoing demands of the global war on terrorism.
That is really not much different from the search engines that are being constructed today for users throughout the entire world to allow them to search through databases to access the information that they require.
So we have a group within the office that is devoted to support for the war fighter. That's, of necessity, an operational and tactical level of concern.
Over the course of two years, we arrived at a point where we began to look at the value added by making information more easily accessible across the intelligence community, both defense and national.
Our focus is on outputs rather than inputs.
One is to ensure that the war fighters and the intelligence analysts get the information that they need when they need it, in a format that's useful to them.
It's easy to measure success by the number of dollars spent or by the number of programs initiated, without having too much regard for what was bought and how useful it was to the people who need it - the war fighter and the analyst.
In other words, by finding the anomalous event, what you do is you get out ahead of activities.
But by providing the background picture - the universal situational awareness that we desire - by showing the anomalies, the Space-Based Radar will change the nature of how we do our analysis and our intelligence.
And to do that not only for the war fighter, but also to help prepare the people in the acquisition, personnel and policy worlds who need to make adjustments in the department's business, which itself may take 10 or 15 years to accomplish.
And then fourth, we have that essential group of people who track programs and budgets to ensure that they align with the needs of preparation and warning, counterintelligence and support to the operational war fighter.
