Testimony of Robert S. Mueller, III, Director, FBI
Before the United
States Senate Committee on the Judiciary
July 23, 2003
"Combatting Terrorism"
Good morning Chairman Hatch,
Senator Leahy, and Members of the Committee.
I am pleased to be here this
morning to update you on the issues we discussed during my
March 4th appearance before the Committee and to assure you
that the FBI has been working hard to protect the American
people from another terrorist attack. The FBI has continued
to make significant progress in our reorganization, our ongoing
efforts to improve our collection and use of intelligence,
and our commitment to demonstrating our respect for Constitutional
liberties in all our investigations and programs. I also want
to thank you for your continued commitment and interest in
ensuring the success of the FBI -- the men and women of the
FBI appreciate that support and demonstrate daily their determination
to fulfill the great responsibility that you, and the public,
have entrusted to them.
Challenges and Progress Since March 2003
Even in the relatively short
time since I appeared before this Committee in March, we have
continued to make progress in improving and reorganizing the
FBI so that we function more efficiently and are able to respond
more rapidly to world events and changes in technology - both
the technology available to us and that used by criminals
to threaten our economic interests and infrastructure.
We are committed to using the
authorities provided by the Patriot Act to protect the American
people while continuing our commitment to honoring Constitutional
protections, including First Amendment freedoms of speech,
religion, and assembly.
Patriot Act
Our efforts to combat terrorism
have been greatly aided by the provisions of the Patriot Act.
Our success in preventing another catastrophic attack on the
U.S. homeland would have been much more difficult, if not
impossible, without the Act. It has already proved extraordinarily
beneficial in the war on terrorism, and our opportunities
to use it will only increase. I would like to take a minute
to discuss how the USA Patriot Act has made the FBI more effective.
First, and foremost, the Patriot
Act has produced greater collection and sharing of information
within the law enforcement and intelligence communities.
As you know, prior to the USA
Patriot Act, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)
statute was interpreted as requiring that FISA surveillance
was permitted only when the "primary purpose" of
the FISA surveillance was to obtain foreign intelligence information.
In order to ensure that the primary purpose of FISA surveillance
did not shift during the investigation, criminal investigators
were essentially walled off from intelligence investigations.
A metaphorical "wall" was erected between intelligence
and law enforcement out of concern that sharing of information
between intelligence and criminal investigators would lead
to coordination of intelligence investigations with criminal
investigations and that the primary purpose of the FISA surveillance
would become developing evidence for a criminal case.
Section 218 of the Act displaced
the "primary purpose" standard, permitting the use
of FISA when a "significant purpose" of the surveillance
was to obtain foreign intelligence information. In addition,
section 504(a) clarified that coordination between intelligence
and criminal personnel was not grounds for denial of a FISA
application. These changes, when combined with the 2002 FISA
Court of Review decision interpreting the new language, effectively
dismantled the wall between law enforcement and intelligence
personnel. The resulting free flow of information and coordination
between law enforcement and intelligence has expanded our
ability to use all appropriate resources to prevent terrorism.
As a result, although the legal
standard for obtaining a FISA warrant is still "probable
cause" to believe that the target is a foreign power
or an agent of a foreign power, we now have more opportunities
to employ FISA and greater dissemination of the information
that flows from FISA surveillance.
I should add that information
is flowing more freely in both directions. Patriot Act Section
203 modified the rules governing the handling of information
obtained through the grand jury or Title III surveillance,
so that we may now disclose, without delay, any foreign intelligence
information obtained through these criminal investigative
tools to the Director of Central Intelligence and Homeland
Security officials. In fact, Section 905 mandates these disclosures.
In addition, Section 219 gave
federal judges the authority to issues search warrants that
are valid outside the issuing judge's district in terrorism
investigations. In the past, a court could only issue a search
warrant for premises within the same judicial district. Our
investigations of terrorist networks often span a number of
districts, and this change, which is limited to terrorism
cases, eliminated unnecessary delays and burdens associated
with having to present warrants to different judges across
the country.
Title III of the Act, also known
as the International Money Laundering Anti-Terrorist Financing
Act of 2001, has armed us with a number of new weapons in
our efforts to identify and track the financial structure
supporting terrorist groups. Past terrorist financing methods
have included the use of informal systems for transferring
funds in a manner that is difficult to detect and trace. The
effectiveness of such methods should be significantly eroded
by the Act, which establishes stricter rules for correspondent
bank accounts, requires securities brokers and dealers to
file Suspicious Activity Reports or SARS, and certain cash
businesses to register with FinCEN and file SARS for a wider
range of financial transactions.
There are other provisions of the Act that have considerably
aided our efforts to address the terrorist threat including:
strengthening the existing ban on providing material support
to terrorists and terrorist organizations; the authority to
seize terrorist assets; and the power to seize money subject
to forfeiture in a foreign bank account by authorizing the
seizure of a foreign bank's funds held in a U.S. correspondent
account.
Mr. Chairman, it is important
for the Committee and the American people to know that the
FBI is using the Patriot Act authorities in a responsible
manner. We are making every effort to effectively balance
our obligation to protect Americans from terrorism with our
obligation to protect their civil liberties.
Intelligence
In addition to these areas,
the Patriot Act also created new opportunities to strengthen
and expand the FBI's long-standing intelligence capability
and allowed us to move from thinking about "intelligence
as a case" to finding "intelligence in the case"
and sharing it broadly both within the FBI and with our Intelligence
and Law Enforcement Community partners. Intelligence has always
been a core competency of the FBI and organic to the FBI's
investigative mission. The intelligence cycle of requirements,
collection, analysis, dissemination and feedback always was
and is now carried out across our extended investigative enterprise
of Headquarters divisions, field offices, resident agencies
and legal attaches. With the Patriot Act, we have been able
to share the information resulting from those activities across
the FBI enterprise to create a single information space for
FBI analysts to assess the threat environment. Cases have
always been and remain a viable organizing principle for FBI
work. The Patriot Act has allowed us to ensure that the aggregate
intelligence gleaned from those cases is analyzed for trends
and for connections that might not be visible to us from a
review of individual cases. This threat-based look at FBI
intelligence has allowed us to uncover terrorist networks
and connections within the United States that otherwise might
not have been found.
Similarly, the Patriot Act has
allowed FBI and our Intelligence and Law Enforcement Community
partners to exchange information that previously was not shared.
The wide availability of threat information from all sources
has been key to our success in using intelligence to drive
our investigations toward prevention. Today we view all cases
as intelligence cases, and prosecution as only one tool in
the available national toolkit for neutralizing threats to
the homeland. Among the many lessons that September 11, 2001
taught us was that threats neither respect geographical boundaries
nor the authorities of those charged with acting to prevent
them. Our ability to share threat information with all of
our partners has been a key factor in neutralizing many threats
through a variety of means.
To properly manage this expanded
intelligence capability, I decided in January of this year
to elevate intelligence to program status at the FBI. I made
that decision because of the success we had achieved with
intelligence in the counter-terrorism mission, thanks in large
measure to help from our partners at the CIA. As we succeeded
in doing strategic analysis and sharing raw intelligence with
our partners, it became clear to me that we must take the
lessons learned and apply them across the FBI. I wanted the
same single focus on intelligence that I had created for our
operational missions. To that end, I proposed the creation
of an Executive Assistant Director for Intelligence and have
undertaken a program to develop and implement concepts of
operations for key intelligence functions.
The result of this program will
be a strategic plan for intelligence at the FBI and the implementation
of a series of pilots and high-leverage initiatives. The FBI
has always been a great collector of information. With our
new program and the Patriot Act, we have now become a great
and powerful producer of information for the nation.
Information Technology Update
Finally, I would like to provide
to the Committee an update concerning our progress in upgrading
our Information Technology capabilities.
Since the 9/11 tragedy, the
FBI has had a number of IT successes. The most significant
of our system related successes is the upgrade of our data
communications infrastructure. As part of the Trilogy program,
the FBI's world wide high speed data communications network
(the Trilogy Network) became operational on March 28, 2003.
This network is a significant increase in capability to share
all kinds of data, to include video and images, among all
FBI locations throughout the world. It is a fully integrated
modern data network utilizing leased lines and the TCP/IP
communications protocols as well as state of the art switches,
routers and encrypters. It is capable of being managed end-to-end
from our new Enterprise Operations Center (EOC), also part
of the Trilogy upgrade. The network at the SECRET level will
be available to all FBI personnel worldwide. This network
will be the backbone for the implementation of most of our
IT systems for years to come.
In order to support our increased
counterterrorism efforts and to support our efforts to share
information with other agencies in the intelligence community,
we have installed a Local Area Network that can carry compartmented
intelligence information. This network is called SCION or
SCI Operational Network. It was formerly called the TS/SCI
LAN. It became operational to more than 100 analysts in January
of 2003 and in June was extended to more than 500. At the
present time, all users are located at Headquarters. This
is being extended to the TTIC this month. It will also be
extended to field locations as resources become available.
It will be carried by our new data network but protected by
its own separate encryption.
As part of the Trilogy upgrade,
Bureau personnel throughout the world are having their desktop
computers upgraded to state of the art. This upgrade is complete
for all field locations and is currently ongoing at headquarters.
Additionally, all servers have been upgraded. The upgrades
that have been completed are the Trilogy Fast Track effort
that is a result of the 9/11 disaster. Additional upgrades,
primarily in software are targeted for completion in November,
2003. All of these upgrades are necessary for the first implementation
of the Virtual Case File, scheduled for December, 2003. The
VCF is the result of a re-engineering of workflow processes
and combines several existing databases into one and simplifies
the workflow. Previous automation efforts in the FBI basically
automated paper process, retaining all of the steps in those
processes. The VCF development team took a hard look at those
processes and with the involvement of agents and support personnel
from the field, has re-engineered them to obtain significant
efficiencies from our systems. The final version of VCF is
targeted for delivery in June, 2004.
Mr. Chairman, we have developed an on-line information technology
presentation at FBI Headquarters of the FBI's terrorism database
and a demonstration of the analytical tools available to our
analysts. In fact, many members of this Committee have been
to Headquarters for the presentation. I would like to take
this opportunity to reiterate the invitation to all members
to come to Headquarters for a more in-depth discussion and
demonstration of our enhanced information technology capabilities.
Conclusion
In closing, Mr. Chairman, I
would like to thank this Committee for its continued leadership
and support. The FBI's capabilities are improving daily in
large part due to that support, and we will continue on this
positive path with the benefit of your continued interest
and leadership.
I am happy to respond to any
questions you may have.
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