Michael McCaul Quotes

The American people should be informed about what kind of capability terrorists have inside the United States. They should be informed of why we are not using information to do a more effective job of dealing with terrorists.

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.

ISIL, AQ, now have the ability to literally reach into our homeland through social media, through the Internet, to recruit and inspire. It makes for a more complicated homeland security environment. And so it requires a whole of government approach, not just military and law enforcement, homeland security, aviation security, and the like.

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

200,000 ISIS tweets a day, 1,000 investigations in all 50 states. It's really hard to stop all of it. But we have to get control over this Internet propaganda that is poisoning the minds of the United States.

I think, in the wake of Sept. 11, it's important for the American public to understand that to the extent that there are individuals within the United States who would undertake terrorist attacks, that we are doing something to address that.

I go to social media, check out my granddaughter's new boyfriend, but the Department of Homeland Security can't figure out they need to be tracking they jihadi web sites?

We have a reliable computerized network devoted to counterterrorist activities.

A broad base of knowledge is critically important to our ability to investigate terrorism.

Once the attacks occur, as we learned on Sept. 11, it is too late. It makes little sense to deprive ourselves of an important, and legal, means to detect and prevent terrorist attacks while we are still in the middle of a fight to the death with al Qaeda.

Social media is not only the most important tool for inciting terrorists, it can also be an effective weapon against them.

The central role in the fight against terrorism is with national authorities.

I think the American people believe in stopping and preventing terrorism pretty much at any cost.

Since the tragedies, the Department of Homeland Security was established to prevent terrorist attacks within the United States, and most importantly, to share intelligence information among government agencies and departments.

This program has been successful in detecting and preventing attacks inside the United States.

All of the leading terrorism experts are clear on one thing: that in terms of protecting America, we are almost never going to know a place or a time of an attack.

President George W. Bush's aggressive war on Islamic terrorism produced a 100 percent perfect track record of keeping the United States safe from another attack. The result has been increased security for the American people, who, in turn, have become complacent about the true nature of the threat.

As president of the United States, my top priority will be to keep America safe. We're going to go after the terrorist networks. We're going to go after Osama bin Laden. We are not going to live in fear in this country.

I am committed to protecting our country against the threat of terrorism.

You can gesture at the transnational problem of Islamist terrorism all you like, but it's just hot air unless you invest in proper security on the ground in your own country, with the right safeguards to civil liberties.

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

Do we need to tighten restrictions on people coming into the country? I think there's a good argument for that, but a kind of broad ban is a bad idea, and, of course, many American Muslims are great sources of information as we seek to look for domestic folks who might be engaged in trying to promote terrorist activities.

The nature of Homeland Security is that no news is good news. And no news sometimes means somebody got interdicted at the border, somebody got interdicted before they could get on an airplane, somebody was arrested providing material support to terrorism. Homeland Security means very often something you never hear about.

For the FBI and for the United States, the war on terrorism is a complex and perplexing issue. It is as complex and perplexing as any issue we have ever faced.

ICE does a lot of other things that people don't realize. They work on counterterrorism, cyber security.