There's a perception that police are less likely to do the marginal additional policing that suppresses crime: the getting out of your car at 2 in the morning and saying to a group of guys, 'What are you doing here?'
I think that citizens should be skeptical of government power. But I fear it's bled over to cynicism. It is something that is getting in the way of reasoned discussion, and I'm very concerned about how to change that trend of cynicism.
As a communication medium, social media is a critical tool for terror groups to exploit.
I have trouble applying the 'whistle-blower' label to someone who just disagrees with the way our country is structured and operates.
There is no doubt something has happened that is lasting in terms of attractiveness of the nightmare that is the Islamic State.
The benefits of our increasingly digital lives have been accompanied by new dangers, and we have been forced to consider how criminals and terrorists might use advances in technology to their advantage.
Hate crimes impact not just individuals but entire communities. When a family is attacked because of the color of their skin, it's not just the family that feels violated, but every resident of that neighborhood.
When someone sends you an email, they are knocking on your door. And when you open the attachment, without looking through the peephole to see who it is, you just opened the door and let a stranger into your life, where everything you care about is.
WhatsApp has over a billion customers, and they are overwhelmingly good people. But in that billion customers are terrorists and criminals... It's a huge feature of terrorist tradecraft.
Many of us develop different flavors of cynicism that we work hard to resist because they can be lazy mental shortcuts.
Do not let fear become disabling. That is what the terrorists want. They want you to imagine them in the shadows; they want you to imagine them as something greater than they are.
Cybercrime is becoming everything in crime. Again, because people have connected their entire lives to the Internet, that's where those who want to steal money or hurt kids or defraud go. So it's an epidemic for reasons that make sense.
Unfortunately, changing forms of Internet communication are quickly outpacing laws and technology designed to allow for the lawful intercept of communication content.
Cisco projects that in 2020, now just five years away, there will be seven billion people on the earth and 50 billion devices connected to the Internet. Six-and-a-half devices on average per person. As a father of five young adults and teenagers, I think we are - in my household, we've exceeded the 6.5 number.
The promise I've tried to honor my entire career, that the rule of law and the design of the founders, right, the oversight of courts and the oversight of Congress will be at the heart of what the FBI does.
The Internet offers the ability for people to consume poison and radicalize entirely in private, either through a device they're holding in their hands or inside their house.
I was a high school senior and home alone one night with my younger brother. And a guy - gunman - kicked in our front door at our home in New Jersey and held the two of us captive. We escaped. He caught us again. We escaped again. So, a pretty horrific experience.
Although individual states have primary responsibility for conducting fair and impartial elections, the FBI becomes involved when paramount federal interests are affected or electoral abuse occurs.
The people of the FBI are sworn to protect both security and liberty. It isn't a question of conflict. We must care deeply about protecting liberty through due process of law, while also safeguarding the citizens we serve - in every investigation.
The Chattanooga killer was inspired by a foreign terror organization. It's hard to entangle which particular source... there are lots of competing poisons out there.
A lot of terrorists fled out of Afghanistan.
ISIL is not your parents' al Qaeda. It's a very different model.
As all of our lives become digital, the logic of encryption is all of our lives will be covered by strong encryption, and therefore all of our lives - including the lives of criminals and terrorists and spies - will be in a place that is utterly unavailable to court-ordered process. And that, I think, to a democracy should be very, very concerning.
Folks are wandering around that proverbial parking lot of the Internet all day long, without giving it a thought to whose attachments they're opening, what sites they're visiting. And that makes it easy for the bad guys.
Only a crazy person wouldn't fear approaching a car with tinted windows during a late-night car stop, or pounding up a flight of stairs to execute a search warrant, or fast-roping from a helicopter down into hostile fire. Real agents, like real people, feel that fear in the pit of their stomachs.
The spine of the FBI is the rule of law. The spine of the FBI is a commitment to doing the right thing, in the right way, while protecting civil liberties.
I was born into an Irish Catholic family in the New York area in this great, wonderful, and safe country, but the Holocaust has always haunted me, and it has long stood as a stumbling block to faith. How could such a thing be? How is that consistent with the concept of a loving God?
If you've ever talked to a special agent that you know well, and you ask he or she about a dangerous encounter they were involved in, they'll almost always give you the same answer: 'Yeah, I did it, but I was scared to heck the whole time.'
Secretary Clinton used several different servers and administrators of those servers during her four years at the State Department and used numerous mobile devices to view and send e-mail on that personal domain. As new servers and equipment were employed, older servers were taken out of service, stored, and decommissioned in various ways.
Senator Schumer is a partisan.
The threat here focuses primarily on troubled souls in America who are being inspired or enabled online to do something violent for ISIL.
We have perpetrated a myth in our society that being brave means not being afraid, but that's wrong.
Lives are saved when those potential killers are confronted by a police officer, a strong police presence and actual, honest-to-goodness, up-close 'What are you guys doing on this corner at 1 o'clock in the morning' policing. We need to be careful it doesn't drift away from us in the age of viral videos, or there will be profound consequences.
Encryption threatens to lead all of us to a very dark place.
Technology has forever changed the world we live in. We're online, in one way or another, all day long. Our phones and computers have become reflections of our personalities, our interests, and our identities. They hold much that is important to us.
We can only query against that which we have collected. And so if someone has never made a ripple in the pond in Syria in a way that would get their identity or their interest reflected in our database, we can query our database until the cows come home, but there will be nothing show up because we have no record of them.
I believe that Americans should be deeply skeptical of government power. You cannot trust people in power. The founders knew that. That's why they divided power among three branches, to set interest against interest.
The destructive malware attack against Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) in late 2014 was an unprecedented cyber event for the United States in its scope, destructiveness, and economic implications. The FBI responded to this attack with an investigation that was groundbreaking in its scope and collaboration.
Not all of the Islamic State killers are going to die on the battlefield.
Serious debates are taking place about how law enforcement personnel relate to the communities they serve, about the appropriate use of force.
I know there are other Elton Simpsons out there. But I also know there are Elton Simpsons out there I cannot see.
I believe the job of the FBI Director is to be as transparent as possible with the American people because we work for them.
We face cyber threats from state-sponsored hackers, hackers for hire, global cyber syndicates, and terrorists. They seek our state secrets, our trade secrets, our technology, and our ideas - things of incredible value to all of us. They seek to strike our critical infrastructure and to harm our economy.
They do not want people committing violence, either in their community or in the name of their faith, and so some of our most productive relationships are with people who see things and tell us things who happen to be Muslim.
My wife Patrice, in addition to being enormously supportive, has taught me a lot about life. She might argue it's because I have so much to learn. One of the most important things I've learned is the art of listening.
America isn't easy. America takes work.
I worry a bit about the unknowns when it comes to travelers to the war zones in Syria and Iraq. Who don't I see? And I worry about the people who may be in their basements radicalizing that I can't see.
We often speak of domestic terrorism and hate crimes in the same breath, and there is a fine line between the two, and certainly overlap in some cases.
Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.
