Christopher A. Wray Quotes

People talk about the Patriot Act that was passed immediately in the wake of September 11. What the Patriot Act did was break down the walls between the various agencies.

The Patriot Act removed major legal barriers that prevented the law enforcement, intelligence, and national defense communities from talking and coordinating their work to protect the American people and our national security.

Americans don’t spy on Americans.

The public must know about the general outlines of surveillance activities in order to evaluate whether the government is achieving the appropriate balance between privacy and security.

The problem is that the same technological tools we use to thwart terrorists can also be used against the people whose job it is to stop them.

You don't hear anybody talking about what FBI is doing with the NSA collected data. That's because they're doing it in secret. I mean, they're also using it to convict people of crimes, and that's what they're doing - they're looking at it for criminal activity.

Snowden grants that NSA employees by and large believe in their mission and trust the agency to handle the secrets it takes from ordinary people - deliberately, in the case of bulk records collection, and 'incidentally,' when the content of American phone calls and e-mails are swept into NSA systems along with foreign targets.

The NSA has different reporting requirements for each branch of government and each of its legal authorities.

The PATRIOT Act brought down the wall separating intelligence agencies from law enforcement and other entities charged with protecting the Nation from terrorism.

There is not much of a bureaucratic leap, if history is any guide, between a seemingly benign call for 'continuous situational awareness' and the onset of a covert and illegal campaign of domestic surveillance.

To defend our country we need to gather intelligence on the enemy, but when the intelligence lies to Congress, how are we to trust them? The phone records of law abiding citizens are none of their damn business.

So there is a foreign intelligence purpose for every one of our FISA warrants.

I have no evidence of any relationship between IRS and NSA.

We will use all lawful tools at our disposal, and that includes authorities under the renewed PATRIOT Act. We firmly believe that our intelligence gathering tools must enable us to collect the information we need to protect the American people.

The Patriot Act allows and provides a basis for an exchange of information.

Nobody - myself included - believes that we could ever achieve total information awareness. But the government needs to set goals and long-range objectives. Total information awareness is a good goal.

Since we enacted the PATRIOT Act almost three years ago, there has been tremendous public debate about its breadth and implications on due process and privacy.

In the last four years under the Patriot Act, we have seen a great increase in the ability of law enforcement officials to investigate and track terrorists.

Since 9/11, the U.S.A. Patriot Act has torn down the invisible wall that was perceived as preventing the FBI and CIA from sharing information.

The United States Intelligence community collects too much information.

This country, for reasons of history, culture and therefore law, has had an allergy to domestic intelligence.

… there has been no instance in which NSA could say with confidence that the outcome would have been different without the... telephony meta-data program.

We want our spying agencies spying on foreigners. That’s why we have them.

I'm not against the NSA. I'm not against spying; I'm not against looking at phone records.

The FISA Amendment Act of 2008 actually allows some of the things we were doing under the president's authority only against al Qaeda, it allows them for all legitimate foreign intelligence purposes.