Christopher A. Wray Quotes

For years, China expected foreign companies not to publicly voice their complaints about hacking or intellectual-property violations in order to protect their broader interests in the country.

The Great Firewall of China and the unrestricted surveillance by the National Security Agency illustrate a tendency for the state to assert its interests at the expense of individuals.

Cyber-enabled theft of trade secrets by state actors in China has emerged as a major threat to our economic and, thus, national security.

It's a genuine dilemma for governments, deciding how much information to share in this threat-filled era.

The government does not deny it routinely spies to advance American economic advantage, which is part of its broad definition of how it protects American national security.

Americans cannot afford to turn a blind eye to Russian interference in our democracy. We need to get to the facts and learn lessons to prevent future misconduct by foreign governments.

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.

It would be a matter of concern for government if intrusive data capture has been deployed against Indian citizens or government infrastructure.

Trudeau claims he's wary about Chinese espionage, but also says there's nothing wrong with Chinese state-owned enterprises buying up as much of Canada's resource sector as it likes.

I don't think we have wrapped our heads around how much technology has allowed the manipulation of individuals and democracies.

The Russians win when we allow our intelligence community to be politicized, when we allow political opposition research to function as a basis for a warrant to spy on American citizens.

I'm talking about the finding in October that is public now of 17 different intelligence agencies saying Russia tried to meddle with our elections.

Here at home, we need to do two fundamental things. Number one, we need to recognize that technology has moved on. The Patriot Act was signed in 2001, roughly. The iPhone was invented in 2007. The iPad was invented in 2011. Snapchat and Twitter, all the rest of it, have been around just for several years. Technology has moved on, and the terrorists have moved on with it.

The way the United States intelligence community operates is it doesn't limit itself to the protection of the homeland. It doesn't limit itself to countering terrorist threats, countering nuclear proliferation. It's also used for economic espionage, for political spying to gain some knowledge of what other countries are doing.

The Cheney team had, for example, technological supremacy over the National Security Council staff. That is to say, they could read their e-mails. I remember one particular member of the N.S.C. staff wouldn't use e-mail because he knew they were reading it. He did a test case, kind of like the Midway battle, when we'd broken the Japanese code. He thought he'' broken the code, so he sent a test e-mail out that he knew would rile Scooter [Libby], and within an hour Scooter was in his office.

We need the security standards to apply to the internet. We need to be able to trust that when we send our emails through Verizon, that Verizon isn't sharing with the NSA, that Verizon isn't sharing them with the FBI or German intelligence or French intelligence or Russian intelligence or Chinese intelligence.

We know hackers steal people's identities and infiltrate private e-mails. We know foreign countries and companies swipe our corporate secrets.

Technology is not a panacea. I refuse to work on technology to track users, analyze usage patterns, watermark information, censor, detect drug use, or eavesdrop. I am not naive enough to think any of those technologies could enable a 'compromise'.

The government can now delve into personal and private records of individuals even if they cannot be directly connected to a terrorist or foreign government. Bank records, e-mails, library records, even the track of discount cards at grocery stores can be obtained on individuals without establishing any connection to a terrorist before a judge. According to the Los Angeles Times, Al Qaeda uses sophisticated encryption devices freely available on the Internet that cannot be cracked. So the terrorists are safe from cyber-snooping, but we're not.

Clearly we must do everything we can to protect our country from the serious potential of another terrorist attack, but we can and must do so in a way that also protects the constitutional rights of the American people and maintains our free society. We can do that without living in an Orwellian world where the government and private corporations know every telephone call that we make, every website we visit, everyplace we go.

Let's say tomorrow that there was a president, that we elected a president that eliminated the bulk collection of data. Let's just say it happened. What do you think would happen? People are like 'the sky would fall. We would be overrun with jihadists.' Maybe we could rely on the Constitution. Maybe we could get warrants. ... If you make the warrant specific, there's no limit to what you can get through a warrant.

Last night when I was commenting on the FBI and the CIA, the sound went off for 27 minutes. I should have known better.

It certainly woke me up to how vulnerable we all are. I think I was much more cavalier about it before I started working on the movie [Edward Snowden], and then the more I read the documents themselves and saw just how sweeping and indiscriminate the intrusions into our privacy have been, it made me more aware.

We have got a CIA station just up the road – the consulate here in Hong Kong – and I am sure they are going to be busy for the next week. And that is a concern I will live with for the rest of my life, however long that happens to be.

The CIA was revealed to be spying in France, not for military purposes, but for corporate purposes. So this $30 billion spook agency is now at the disposal of these oligarchic corporate structures run by the 1%.