When you can say, I get up in the morning to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution, it keeps people coming back. And I will stack our workforce up against anybody, anywhere, any day.Collection: Morning
When law enforcement fails to fulfill its most basic duty to protect and serve its citizens, particularly members of a minority community, it not only tarnishes the badge we all wear, but erodes the trust that we in law enforcement have worked so hard to build.Collection: Trust
It takes an incredibly special person to be willing to put his or her life on the line for a complete stranger. And to get up every morning, day after day after day, to do that, I think, is extraordinary.Collection: Morning
Every time I attend an FBI graduation for new agents or new analysts at Quantico, a significant number of those graduates are former state and local officers, and I have the privilege of shaking their hands, presenting them with their credentials, and welcoming them to the FBI family.Collection: Graduation
It takes an incredibly special person to be willing to put his or her life on the line for the community, and we owe it to our law enforcement heroes to do whatever we can to make their work safer.
As cyber threats evolve, we need to evolve as well.
Our adversaries - terrorists, foreign intelligence services, and criminals - take advantage of modern technology to hide their communications; recruit followers; and plan, conduct, and encourage espionage, cyber attacks, or terrorism to disperse information on different methods to attack the U.S. homeland and to facilitate other illegal activities.
My loyalty is to the Constitution and the rule of law.
What was once a comparatively minor threat - people hacking for fun or for bragging rights - has turned into full-blown economic espionage and extremely lucrative cyber crime.
A line of duty death, whether an officer, special agent, or professional staff employee, is personal to the FBI, and it's personal to me as Director.
Our mission is simple, but profound - to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution. That mission hasn't changed, and it won't change, not as long as I have anything to say about it.
Our folks at the FBI and at DOJ are working their tails off every day to protect our nation's companies, our universities, our computer networks, and our ideas and innovation.
We need to coordinate closely with international partners, right down to tightly-coordinated execution of seizures, searches, and arrests, so that instead of capturing a single criminal, we're taking down an entire enterprise.
The work of the FBI, to put it mildly, is complex and covers just about every threat we face.
I am very committed to the FBI being agile in its tackling of foreign threats. But I believe you can be agile and still scrupulously follow our rules, policies and processes.
My view is that the cyber threat is bigger than any one government agency - or even the government itself. But the FBI brings a rare combination of scope and scale, experience, and tools to the mix. We investigate criminal activity like intrusions and cyber attacks, but we also investigate national security threats like foreign influence.
In our country, the vast majority of our critical infrastructure and intellectual property is of course in the hands of the private sector.
China has pioneered a societal approach to stealing innovation any way it can, from a wide array of businesses, universities, and organizations.
We, the FBI, don't investigate ideology, no matter how repugnant. When it turns to violence, we're all over it.
All American voices are important, and the FBI's Protected Voices videos and resources will help all Americans protect themselves online.
I think it's important for the American people to be thoughtful consumers of information and to think about the sources of it and to think about the support and predication for what they hear.
We have no information that indicates that Ukraine interfered with the 2016 presidential election.
I can't imagine a situation where, as FBI director, I would be giving a press conference on an uncharged individual, much less talking in detail about it.
The FBI that I see is people, decent people, committed to the highest principles of dignity and professionalism and respect... Now do we make mistakes? You bet we make mistakes, just like everybody who's human makes mistakes.
There's no shortage of opinions about our agency, just like every other agency up here - and just like the Congress. I'd encourage our folks not to get too hung up on what I consider to be the noise on TV and in social media.
My view is that, if any public official or member of any campaign is contacted by any nation-state or anybody acting on behalf of a nation-state about influencing or interfering with our election, then that is something that the FBI would want to know about.
In everything we do, as long as I have anything to say about it, we're going to follow the facts independently, wherever they may lead, to whomever they may lead, no matter who likes it.
I will say that one of the things that hackers, of all shapes and sizes, prize the most in this world is anonymity and stealth and deniability. And by indicting them publicly, among other things, we strip them of that.
I would argue that in the cyber arena, the need for private sector partnership is higher than really anywhere else of any program we have. So, the reality is we couldn't do what we do without the private sector, and vice versa.
At the end of the day, our work is what endures.
We are vested with significant authorities, and it is our obligation as public servants to ensure that these authorities are exercised with objectivity and integrity. Anything less falls short of the FBI's duty to the American people.
The FBI relies on FISA every day in national security investigations to prevent terrorists and foreign intelligence services from harming the United States.
The FBI is a field-based law enforcement organization, and the vast majority of our investigations should continue to be worked by our field offices.
Where protection of certain sensitive information is well-founded, I remain committed to upholding the laws and longstanding policies governing classification and public release.
Non-violent protests are signs of a healthy democracy, not an ailing one.
The FBI holds sacred the rights of individuals to peacefully exercise their First Amendment freedoms.
The FBI's mission is to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution. That mission is both dual and simultaneous - it is not contradictory.
We protect the American people from a staggering range of threats. But make no mistake, securing the homeland against terrorism remains our top priority.
The men and women of the FBI are deployed around the clock, all over our country and around the world, identifying and disrupting threats, and pursuing those who would do us harm.
Whether core al Qaeda or its offshoots like AQAP, ISIS, or the many others - we are working with our partners to find and disrupt them, wherever they are, whether they're plotting attacks on Americans here at home or abroad.
Lack of lawful access certainly affects our ability to do our jobs, but we know where the harm really falls when evidence is kept unavailable - it falls on innocent people, the people we're sworn to protect.
We can't eradicate hate, and we can't wish away evil. But we can continue to stand together on the side of the freedoms we all cherish.
We know that terrorism can happen anywhere, at anytime. And we know the best way to prevent an attack is by working together.
We've shown that when an attack does happen, our agents and analysts will move heaven and earth to find those responsible.
Our work in investigating the Oklahoma City bombing reflected some of the very best the FBI has to offer.
We all want safe, secure, private data, but we also want safe and secure communities. And we can have both. I really do believe that.
User-controlled default encryption is a real challenge for law enforcement.
Given our law enforcement authorities, our central role in the Intelligence Community, and the span of our responsibilities - from counterterrorism to counterintelligence to criminal investigations - we're particularly well-positioned to address cyber threats to our national security.
Some people are skeptical about the value of indictments where a foreign nation-state actor is involved. But in the case of APT10, the indictments marked an important step in publicly exposing China's continued practice of stealing intellectual property to give Chinese firms an unfair advantage in the marketplace.
Put plainly, China seems determined to steal its way up the economic ladder, at our expense.