Quotes from James Comey

In 1983, my second year of law school, I became the only white player in the Ogden Park Basketball League at 65th and Racine. My teammates joked that I integrated the league, which I guess is true. They weren't so much focused on integration as on winning, and they knew you can't teach height. 'He can't jump, but he sure is tall.'

WhatsApp has over a billion customers, and they are overwhelmingly good people. But in that billion customers are terrorists and criminals... It's a huge feature of terrorist tradecraft.

The spine of the FBI is the rule of law. The spine of the FBI is a commitment to doing the right thing, in the right way, while protecting civil liberties.

Although individual states have primary responsibility for conducting fair and impartial elections, the FBI becomes involved when paramount federal interests are affected or electoral abuse occurs.

There is no such thing as absolute privacy in America.

They do not want people committing violence, either in their community or in the name of their faith, and so some of our most productive relationships are with people who see things and tell us things who happen to be Muslim.

I love strong encryption. It protects us in so many ways from bad people. But it takes us to a place - absolute privacy - that we have not been to before.

We don't want to put people in jail unless we prove that they knew they were doing something they shouldn't do.

As technology advances, so too does terrorists' use of technology to communicate - both to inspire and recruit. The widespread use of technology propagates the persistent terrorist message to attack U.S. interests, whether in the homeland or abroad.

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.

Social media has allowed groups, such as ISIL, to use the Internet to spot and assess potential recruits. With the widespread horizontal distribution of social media, terrorists can identify vulnerable individuals of all ages in the United States - spot, assess, recruit, and radicalize - either to travel or to conduct a homeland attack.

The Chattanooga killer was inspired by a foreign terror organization. It's hard to entangle which particular source... there are lots of competing poisons out there.

We often speak of domestic terrorism and hate crimes in the same breath, and there is a fine line between the two, and certainly overlap in some cases.

At some point, there is going to be a terrorist diaspora out of Syria like we've never seen before.

The benefits of our increasingly digital lives have been accompanied by new dangers, and we have been forced to consider how criminals and terrorists might use advances in technology to their advantage.

A lot of terrorists fled out of Afghanistan.

Do not let fear become disabling. That is what the terrorists want. They want you to imagine them in the shadows; they want you to imagine them as something greater than they are.

ISIL does something al-Qaida would never imagine: they test people by tasking them.

I come from a law enforcement family. My grandfather, William J. Comey, was a police officer. Pop Comey is one of my heroes. I have a picture of him on my wall in my office at the FBI, reminding me of the legacy I've inherited and that I must honor.

Only a crazy person wouldn't fear approaching a car with tinted windows during a late-night car stop, or pounding up a flight of stairs to execute a search warrant, or fast-roping from a helicopter down into hostile fire. Real agents, like real people, feel that fear in the pit of their stomachs.

For me, law school was a time of joy and hope. Joy in learning my way around the law - learning how to orbit a problem and to ask myself hard questions and to be asked hard questions. Hope that I could be of some use, to be part of the greater good - to make the world a little bit better.

Unfortunately, changing forms of Internet communication are quickly outpacing laws and technology designed to allow for the lawful intercept of communication content.

There are those who've been hacked by the Chinese and those who don't know they've been hacked by the Chinese.

Many of us develop different flavors of cynicism that we work hard to resist because they can be lazy mental shortcuts.