Ted Cruz Quotes

As a former career intelligence professional, I have a profound appreciation for the value of intelligence. Intelligence disrupts terrorist plots and thwarts attacks. Intelligence saves lives.

As we have all said, we understand that electronic surveillance is a vital tool in the war on terror. We all want to know when Osama bin Laden is calling: when he is calling, who he is calling, and what he is saying.

I think what we've learned is that the terrorist threat is serious, but it shifts. You cannot make a single person the sole focus of your counterterrorism.

Intelligence is our first line of defense against terrorism, and we must improve the collection capabilities and analysis of intelligence to protect the security of the United States and its allies.

The Orlando terrorist is an example of someone who was in the sights of law enforcement but never crossed the threshold from pre-criminal to criminal behavior and, thus, was not tracked adequately before this horrific act.

Any time someone tries to tell you that metadata is 'meaningless, don't worry, it's just who you call, it's just phone records, it's not a big deal' - realize we kill people based on metadata. So they must be pretty darn certain that they think they know something based on metadata.

The security of the United States, which is so dependent on having accurate and timely intelligence, is not a Republican or a Democratic issue.

On average, since 9/11, the FBI reckons that just over 100,000 terrorism leads each year have come over the transom. Analysts and agents designate them as immediate, priority or routine, but the bureau says every one is covered.

I believe that reforming our intelligence community is one of the most important things that we can do in order to ensure that our country is in fact safer, stronger and wiser.

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

We will have to continue to improve our human intelligence system-something that was, unfortunately, lacking in the years which led up to September 11. This is going to be a continuing process of change.

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.

Look, we constantly live looking at the issue of the threat of terrorism.

Able Danger consisted of approximately 20 direct individuals working for Special Forces in Tampa, Florida. The total amount of people working for Able Danger was 20.

Able Danger was a top-secret military planning operation, established in '99 by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to identify cells of al-Qaida worldwide and to take out al Qaida terrorists. They identified five cells worldwide, one of them in Brooklyn.

There is still much to be done by our intelligence community to bring its achievements up to an acceptable level.

If you want to know what a terrorist is doing, you have to put an agent in their camp.

When it comes to terrorism, the only path to safety is the path to action.

It would be highly useful to government espionage to have reports from all our bookstores, all our hardware and retail stores, all our drugstores…. What one buys at the hardware and retail stores may furnish clues to potential uses of wires, soap powders, and the like used by criminals.

The safety and security of the nation depends more so than ever before on intelligence.

If you don’t know who they are, where they are, and what they’re planning, you can’t get them before they get you.

The security [of European national is dependent on the effective intelligence of their neighbors.

We have 17 different intelligence agencies and they are all basic;ly doing the same thing.

The dark space is one of the biggest concerns on the part of counterterrorism officials right now. Comey did a good job of explaining how they jump into a direct messaging box and then go into platforms designed specifically to be secure. There's no way, even if we have a lawful court order, to be able to access those communications.

Just take terrorism, for example. We have a team of more than 200 people working on counterterrorism. I mean, that's pretty intense. That's not like what people think about what Facebook is.