Richard Burr Quotes

There's a conspiracy going on online every day between these top U.K. individuals within ISIS leadership out of Syria.

Unfortunately, we have seen terrorist groups use social media to spread hateful propaganda, to recruit members, and to incite violence with alarming effectiveness.

It is the thing that keeps me up at night - the notion that you have individuals in the United States who are looking at computer screens and who are becoming radicalized.

Social media campaigns and the savviness of ISIS and propaganda is what greatly concerns us Homeland Security officials.

We have about 200,000 ISIS tweets per day that hit the United States. The chatter is so loud and the volume is so high that it's a problem that's very hard to stop and disrupt in this country.

We're dealing with an enemy now, ISIS, that has a very sophisticated social media program.

ISIL particularly is very slick, very sophisticated, proselytizing and recruiting, and they are very astute users of social media.

Some of the people involved in ISIS are going to Iraq, and some of our young people are being radicalised through the Internet.

ISIL are already using the Internet for hideous propaganda purposes - for radicalisation, for operational planning, too.

I am extremely concerned that Syrian and ISIS recruiters can use the Internet at lightning speeds to recruit followers in the United States with thousands of followers in the United States and then activate them to do whatever they want to do.

Look at ISIS - without the Internet, they wouldn't exist in the same form. The Internet didn't create them, but the Internet facilitates them. And as we know from history, the facilitation is more dangerous than the cause, because the cause can be dealt with, but the facilitation is elusive.

We obviously know that terrorist groups have become very reliant on social media.

One of the scariest things about ISIS is their ability to leverage social media to inspire individuals who have never been to Syria and Iraq.

ISIS uses traditional media platforms as well as widespread social media campaigns to propagate its ideology. With the broad distribution of social media, terrorists can spot, assess, recruit, and radicalize vulnerable persons of all ages in the U.S. either to travel to foreign lands or to conduct an attack on the homeland.

ISIL's widespread reach through the Internet and social media is most concerning, as the group has proven dangerously competent at employing such tools for its nefarious strategy. ISIL uses high-quality, traditional media platforms as well as widespread social media campaigns to propagate its extremist ideology.

Twitter is providing a communication device, a loudspeaker for ISIS. If you are promoting violence and a call to violence. If you are promoting violence and a call to violence, you are providing material support. Twitter should be part of the solution. If not, they are part of the problem.

We [Al Qaeda] must make every effort to reach out to Muslims ... through new media like Facebook and Twitter.

I think it's important to note that after the airstrikes began in Iraq and Syria, ISIS began a very aggressive social media campaign calling for these types of attacks, these lone wolf attacks.

What I'm concerned about are two things. I think one that John Miller talked about, and that's the radicalization over the Internet that ISIS is very adept at doing. The other one is a foreign fighter threat.

You and I can go on YouTube and learn how to fix a tractor engine or learn Farsi. Groups are using those tools to recruit young people into a climate of hatred.

Not all of the Islamic State killers are going to die on the battlefield.

ISIL is inspiring groups that already exist to rebrand themselves, but in rebranding themselves into a more radical ideology. That's what makes it dangerous.

I believe it is actually fomenting the growth of ISIL; Donald Trump could be a recruitment poster for ISIL because he is fanning the flames of hate.

We can put a stake through the heart of Islamic State as an army. We can put a stake through the heart of its leaders. You can take away its territory. But you can't put a stake through the heart of the ideas, of the ideology, that sadly, tragically, still has some attraction for some small numbers in the Islamic faith.

Law enforcement has seen an unprecedented use of social media by ISIL. They're just kind of flooding the airwaves.