Martha Stewart is being prosecuted not for who she is but what she did.
Each FBI employee understands that to defeat the key threats facing our nation, we must constantly strive to be more efficient and more effective. Just as our adversaries continue to evolve, so, too, must the FBI.
Many of us develop different flavors of cynicism that we work hard to resist because they can be lazy mental shortcuts.
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 need for reflection and restraint of power is what led Louis Freeh to order that all new agent classes visit the Holocaust Museum here in Washington so they could see and feel and hear in a palpable way the consequences of abuse of power on a massive, almost unimaginable scale.
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.
As technology advances, so too does terrorists' use of technology to communicate - both to inspire and recruit. The widespread use of technology propagates the persistent terrorist message to attack U.S. interests, whether in the homeland or abroad.
Serious debates are taking place about how law enforcement personnel relate to the communities they serve, about the appropriate use of force.
The threat that ISIL presents and poses to the United States is very different in kind, in type and degree than al Qaeda.
I'm a big fan of the rule of law.
Social media has allowed groups, such as ISIL, to use the Internet to spot and assess potential recruits. With the widespread horizontal distribution of social media, terrorists can identify vulnerable individuals of all ages in the United States - spot, assess, recruit, and radicalize - either to travel or to conduct a homeland attack.
In today's YouTube world, are officers reluctant to get out of their cars and do the work that controls violent crime? Are officers answering 911 calls but avoiding the informal contact that keeps bad guys from standing around, especially with guns?
I don't know if it's true or not that folks are less likely to tell police when they see things.
I know there are other Elton Simpsons out there. But I also know there are Elton Simpsons out there I cannot see.
Unfortunately, changing forms of Internet communication are quickly outpacing laws and technology designed to allow for the lawful intercept of communication content.
The diverse threats we face are increasingly cyber-based. Much of America's most sensitive data is stored on computers. We are losing data, money, and ideas through cyber intrusions. This threatens innovation and, as citizens, we are also increasingly vulnerable to losing our personal information.
It's not about the stuff. The issue is how we use that stuff and how do we train people to use that stuff. Do we use that stuff to confront people who are protesting in a community? Do we use a sniper rifle to see closer in a crowd? That's where it breaks down.
When I worked as a prosecutor in Richmond, Virginia in the 1990s, that city, like so much of America, was experiencing horrific levels of violent crime. But to describe it that way obscures an important truth: for the most part, white people weren't dying; black people were dying. Most white people could drive around the problem.
What makes the bravery of the men and women of the FBI so special is that they know exactly what they're in for. They spend weeks and weeks in an academy learning just how hard and dangerous this work is. Then they raise their right hands and take an oath and do that work anyway.
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.
