Serving as FBI Director for the past seven-plus years has given me an unparalleled view of the threats to our country’s public safety and national security. I believe these threats are more dangerous and complex than at any time I can recall since I began my career in law enforcement almost 30 years ago.
Our adversaries, whether they be violent gangs, child predators, cartels, hackers, hostile nation-states, or terrorists, are more emboldened, better resourced, savvier with technology, and more relentless than ever before. With a keystroke, a foreign hacker can shut down a hospital or take our critical infrastructure offline. A would-be terrorist can communicate with plotters overseas through encrypted apps to secretly plan an attack on U.S. soil. Cartels can manufacture loads of deadly drugs with a potency no one has ever seen before using chemicals acquired half a world away.
The terrorism threat is elevated across the board. Foreign terrorist organizations have drawn inspiration from Hamas’s horrific attacks to plot coordinated attacks here in the Homeland, while violent extremists inspired by a variety of ideologies and grievances are mobilizing more quickly than ever and leaving fewer dots for investigators to connect and even less time to connect them.
The tragedy in New Orleans on New Year’s Day is a recent illustration of the danger posed by individuals radicalized online using easily accessible weapons to go after soft targets – everyday people going about their everyday lives – making the terrorism threat even harder to detect, investigate, and disrupt.
Foreign adversaries like China, Russia, and Iran are not just stealing government secrets, they’re targeting the American people directly and going after the things we rely on most. Hostile nation-states are stealing the personal data of Americans on a staggering scale, conducting widespread theft from businesses large and small, exporting their own brands of repression to our shores, and engaging in audacious cyber operations aimed at our critical infrastructure.
The Chinese government, in particular, has engineered an unprecedented effort to gut American innovation, steal our most precious personal data, and meddle in our free and open society. History will mark this as the defining threat of our generation.
Beyond terrorism and nation-state threats, violent crime, which reached alarming levels in recent years, still plagues far too many communities. Cartels are flooding our country with fentanyl and other deadly drugs, claiming countless American lives each year. And child predators lurk in the dark recesses of the internet, targeting the innocent and vulnerable.
In recent years, working together, the FBI and our partners have arrested nearly 50 violent criminals per day, every day. They’ve rescued hundreds of children from their tormentors and put hundreds of predators behind bars. They’ve dismantled hundreds of gangs terrorizing neighborhoods all over the country and seized enough fentanyl to kill nearly 80 percent of all Americans. They’ve innovated to tackle emerging threats by taking the fight to cyber criminals, saving victims around the world nearly $800 million in ransom payments. And they’ve kept watch against the ever-present threat of terrorism, thwarting attacks targeting houses of worship in Las Vegas, Long Beach, and Pittsburgh, a crowded pier in San Francisco, a Fourth of July parade in Cleveland, and countless other communities across the nation.
