I trust Robert Mueller, I trust our intelligence community and I trust our national security community because I've worked with them my entire adult life.
Sometimes, the intelligence community does legal collection against a legitimate foreign intelligence target and that target interacts with U.S. persons, against whom our people thus end up collecting information as a collateral matter.
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.
The Homeland Security department doesn't have tasking authority in the intelligence community. They can ask for stuff, but they can't direct anything except inside their bureau.
All officers of the Intelligence Community, and especially its most senior officer, must conduct themselves in a manner that earns and retains the public trust. The American people are uncomfortable with government activities that do not take place in the open, subject to public scrutiny and review.
There are lots of examples of routine, middle-skilled jobs that involve relatively structured tasks, and those are the jobs that are being eliminated the fastest. Those kinds of jobs are easier for our friends in the artificial intelligence community to design robots to handle them. They could be software robots; they could be physical robots.
I can remember when I was National Security Adviser, the intelligence community told us... they put out an intelligence report saying that Iran would never back off from attacks on shipping in the Gulf if we use force.
Within the Intelligence Community, CIA is the keeper of the human intelligence mission. Technical forms of collection are vital, but a good human source is unique and can deliver decisive intelligence on our adversaries' secrets - even their intent.
If we cannot share aspects of our secret work with the public, we should do so with their elected representatives. For CIA oversight is a vital link to the open society we defend. It's a defining feature of the U.S. intelligence community and one of the many things that distinguishes us from the hostile services we face in the field.
The intelligence community, for the most part, has no accountability at all; to the Congress, to us the American people, and so they feel that they above the law.
