Robert Mueller Quotations

I know when I was here prosecuting homicides in the District of Columbia, one of the most effective units here was the cold case squad, which had on it FBI agents, as well as Metropolitan Police Department homicide detectives working together.

In the United States, it's the mandate of the FBI to gather information relating to terrorism, go out and collect it, to do the interviews, to do the investigative work.

In the context of September 11, there were so many that lost their lives that - how do you single out one person? There were so many acts of heroism that day from so many people, whether it be firemen and police officers in New York and our agents also.

Prior to the passage of the Patriot Act, it was very difficult - often impossible - for us to share information with the Central Intelligence Agency, with NSA, with the other intelligence agencies, and likewise, for them to share information with us.

We had to address information technology in the ways we had not before and give the agents the tools that they need to do their job more efficiently and more expeditiously.

They're - FBI agents are some of the finest people you'll find anyplace in the country or the world. And I'm lucky to have the opportunity to work with them.

But we had - I think if you look at law enforcement 10 years ago, if you look at the challenges, the FBI was focused excessively on what was happening in the United States.

In order to be successful against each of these threats, we have to have a presence overseas, work closely not only with our counterparts in the law enforcement community, but also with the intelligence community.

The FBI's principal priority right now is protecting the United States against another terrorist attack.

And so every one of us in the FBI, I don't care if it's a file clerk someplace or an agent there or a computer specialist, understands that our main mission is to protect the public from another September 11, another terrorist attack.

I would say in just about every investigation we have, there will be differences of opinion, where you have partial facts, as to what those facts mean.

There'll be differences of opinion in just about every intelligence analysis that you make.

It's because we need to determine who in this country is poised, positioned to commit terrorist acts.

The collapse of Enron was devastating to tens of thousands of people and shook the public's confidence in corporate America.

But since September 11, we have made every effort to try to work closely with state and local law enforcement.

I didn't know the organization, but the one thing you can say about the FBI, it's tremendously professional.

In planning an attack, persons have various roles.

As I said before, there are often disagreements as to what a particular set of facts mean. That is not at all unusual, and one shouldn't read into it more than is there.

If you look at the 19 hijackers who came to the United States in Sept. 11 to commit those acts, if you'd looked at them before they got onto a plane, you could probably say the same thing. There were various levels of expertise, various levels of competence.

People talk about the Patriot Act that was passed immediately in the wake of September 11. What the Patriot Act did was break down the walls between the various agencies.

Secondly, not only have we put additional agents on counterterrorism, but we've also built up our analytical structure so that we're better positioned to analyze the information we have.

And from the moment that we realized it was a terrorist attack, there isn't an agent or a support person in the FBI that wasn't committed to bringing to justice those who were responsible for this.

So there is a foreign intelligence purpose for every one of our FISA warrants.

And at that point, I think we all realized it was something tremendously tragic, probably a terrorist attack, and the next step was to go down to our command center and get things going.

What all of us in the FBI - it's not just me - all of us in the FBI are concerned about is protecting American people against another attack.

We know well and are confident in Italy's significant experience and capabilities in organizing security for major international events.

Maintaining a code of silence will not benefit you or your company in the long run. Our safely lies not only in protecting our own interest, but our critical infrastructure as a whole.

Given the circumstance in New York, the protocols relating to our handling of informants changed dramatically.

Four thousand agents are still assigned to portions of the investigation, are still following leads to determine whether or not there are any associates, financial supporters or others who are still in the United States.

For us, it is not just having a terrorist event happening and then gathering the evidence to put it in a courtroom to convict somebody after we're able to identify him, detain him and extradite him.

Today, a command sent over a network to a power station's control computer could be just as deadly as a backpack full of explosives,

I will tell you we have no one person, specifically, that stands out at this juncture.

I was in my office when - on 9/11. I think I had a number of meetings scheduled. I was just getting to know the bureau. And somebody walked in and said the first plane had - or a plane had struck the World Trade Center, one of the towers.

We are not facing these outlaws on our own. No person, no agency, no company, indeed no country can prevent crime on its own.

We do have investigations going. Leaking of classified materials is a concern for those agencies that have classified materials.

As it is all over the country, you have instances of people taking matters into their own hands.

Convergence is not a trend, it's a necessity. To maintain a competitive lead in exotic technologies takes a lot, so a lot of key devices are driven by the consumer market because that market offers the kind of scale necessary for profits.

In Australia, a computer hacker used a laptop and a two-way radio to hack into a sewage control computer system, releasing more than 250 tons of raw sewage onto the grounds of a luxury resort hotel,

The Italians are tremendously professional in protecting and providing security for such events, and from everything I saw, everything is well prepared and ready for the Olympics.

All I'm going to tell you is investigations, whether it be this and others, where you have partial facts, analysts, agents are always trying to interpret what those facts mean, extrapolate from them what they mean.

So without getting into the specifics, I can tell you that to the extent that investigation is a relatively important investigation and meaningful, the president would have been periodically briefed.

I was in my office when - on 9/11. I think I had a number of meetings scheduled. I was just getting to know the bureau. And somebody walked in and said the first plane had - or a plane had struck the World Trade Center, one of the towers.

What we bring to the table is not only our 56 field offices in the United States and our number of resident agencies, but also we have 45 legal attaches overseas.

No one has ever been able to convince me that optimism is not preferable to pessimism.

I think around the world, our agents are the best collectors of information you'll find.

In the last 10 years, in narcotics task forces, in a number of violent crime task forces, we've worked very closely together with state and local law enforcement.

The 19 hijackers that came over here to commit the attack on Sept. 11, there were those that were at the bottom of the line. There were those who were the principal conspirators. There were those who were the pilot. Everybody has a role.

We cannot go up on a wire. We cannot do a search without a judge on the FISA Court approving it and determining that we have met the standard that has been set forth by Congress in order to utilize these techniques.

Leaking of classified material is a concern.

I asked a Burmese why women, after centuries of following their men, now walk ahead. He said there were many unexploded land mines since the war.

In the future, the cyber threat will equal or even eclipse the terrorist threat,

We must move as quickly as possible to a one-world government; a one-world religion; under a one world leader.

There are only two types of companies: those that have been hacked, and those that will be. Even that is merging into one category: those that have been hacked and will be again,