Good morning! It is a pleasure to be with you here in the
Windy City.
I know that over the past week, you
have been immersed in discussions about financial
crimes, from mortgage fraud to identity theft.
In looking through my program, I noticed
that some of the sessions earlier in the week
were entitled "Introduction to Credit Card
Fraud," "Introduction to Check Crimes," and
"Introduction to Internet Crimes." It sounds like an ideal course catalogue - not just for financial
crimes investigators, but also for aspiring
criminals!
Back in Washington, I serve as the Executive Assistant Director for Law Enforcement
Services. Before that, I headed up the FBI's Criminal
Investigative Division, where every day featured
a meeting of financial crimes investigators.
One of the highlights of my current
job is meeting with groups like this - dedicated
public servants who share the FBI's mission
to protect our fellow citizens from crime
and terrorism.
The FBI has long been regarded as the world's premier law enforcement
agency - and it still is.
But the attacks of September 11, 2001,
changed the course of American history, and
of the FBI's history.
Since that day, nearly three years
ago, the FBI has moved steadily from an organization
that was primarily focused on traditional
criminal investigations to one that is actively
investigating and disrupting terrorism.
Today, I want to give you an overview of the FBI's ongoing transformation into
the world's premier investigative, counterterrorism
and domestic intelligence agency. I also want to talk about the threats we face in the financial crimes
arena, and how we not only can, but
must work together to meet and defeat
these threats.
* * *
Most
of you know the FBI was created almost a century
ago because crime had begun to cross county
and state lines.
In the 1930s, bank robbers and other
criminals took advantage of new technology
- cars - to help them escape across state
borders and elude capture and prosecution.
Back then, bank robberies were one of the
few forms of financial crime.
Nearly 100 years later, criminal activity traverses international boundaries
with the click of a mouse, and criminals can
hide behind the cloak of anonymity provided
by the Internet. Today, we are not just chasing bank robbers
across state lines.
We are tracking Internet hackers, corrupt
CEOs, identity thieves, human traffickers,
and terrorists and their supporters across
international boundaries.
We
are seeing a growing convergence of threats
both old and new.
We see organized crime laundering money
for drug groups. Drug groups selling weapons to terrorists. Terrorists committing white-collar fraud to
raise money for their operations.
All of them exploiting the Internet
in one way or another.
Crime,
like business, has gone global.
The threats we face today have an increasingly
international dimension - from telemarketing
fraud and identity theft, to computer viruses
and corporate espionage, to the trafficking
of weapons or human beings, to terrorism. Criminal and terrorist enterprises have replaced the threats of
the last century.
Unfortunately, these threats
are the product of the modern world in which
we live. Fortunately, we in the FBI have changed
to meet these new threats.
Let me give you a few examples.
First,
we adjusted our priorities.
Today, our counterterrorism program
is our number one priority, followed by counterintelligence
and cyber crime.
This means that no counterterrorism
matter goes unaddressed, even if it means
a diversion of resources from other FBI programs.
Every other FBI program, including
criminal, supports these top three priorities
either directly or indirectly.
Second,
we overhauled the structure of the FBI, adding
the Office of Intelligence, the Security Division,
the Terrorism Financing Operations Section
and the Espionage Section to support these
new priorities.
The Criminal Division and the field
completed a very significant restructuring
and change in business practices.
Priorities are now based on threats,
and investigations are intelligence-driven.
We also realigned our workforce, shifting
agents to counterterrorism and adding hundreds
more agents and analysts.
We also centralized counterterrorism
management at FBI Headquarters to ensure that
we can coordinate investigations across the
country and throughout the world.
Third,
we dramatically increased our intelligence
capability.
While the FBI has always excelled at
intelligence-gathering, we needed to improve
our ability to analyze and share that information. We created an Office of Intelligence and appointed
an Executive Assistant Director for Intelligence
to oversee all intelligence functions throughout
the FBI.
We are recruiting and training hundreds
of intelligence analysts, and establishing
an intelligence career path for both agents
and analysts. We are active participants in the Terrorist
Threat Integration Center and the Terrorist
Screening Center. And Director Mueller recently proposed the
establishment of a Directorate of Intelligence
within the FBI, which will have broad authority
over all intelligence-related functions.
Day
by day, intelligence is woven more deeply
into the fabric of all FBI programs and operations. Intelligence is becoming as routine to every
FBI Agent as his or her gun and credentials.
Fourth,
we improved our information sharing and coordination
with the private sector and our law enforcement
and intelligence partners.
The Patriot Act broke down the barriers
that hindered our cooperation with the CIA.
We have made a tremendous effort to
strengthen and build upon our relationships
with our private sector, federal, state, and
local partners.
Today, we have 100 Joint Terrorism
Task Forces around the country. In 2001, we had only 35. Today, we have 49 Legal Attaché offices around
the world, assisting our international counterparts
in intelligence and law enforcement.
Today, we all sit at the same conference
tables. We
exchange officers and agents.
We chase down leads and solve cases
together.
Fifth,
we have made tremendous progress in upgrading
our information technology. We all know that it doesn't take long for criminals
and terrorists to catch on to our technology
and to adjust their tactics.
Secure, state-of-the-art information
technology systems are critical to our ability
to share information and to perform our core
investigative functions. We are well on our way toward modernizing our information technology,
and we have plans in place to continually
upgrade it so that we stay several steps ahead
of our enemies.
Sixth,
we continued to uphold our traditional criminal
responsibilities. We are still investigating violent crime, drugs, organized crime,
gang activity, and financial crimes.
We are still cracking down on corporate
fraud and public corruption. We are still committed to protecting the civil
liberties of all Americans.
This
is no small feat.
To effectively confront all the criminal
threats we face, the FBI has had to use its
resources strategically, focusing on areas
where we bring something special to the table
or have unique jurisdiction.
Today, all assets of our criminal program
are leveraged to support our counterterrorism,
counterintelligence, and cyber priorities.
This strategy has helped us to eliminate
institutional stovepipes, improve information
sharing, and fully integrate intelligence
into our criminal programs.
The criminal program has also pioneered a key counterterrorism strategy - focusing
on the underlying threat and not just the
overt criminal action.
It is not enough to capture terrorist
operatives - we must demolish the entire terrorist
organization, from financiers on up. The same is true for criminal organizations. Whether a criminal enterprise manipulates stocks,
or smuggles drugs, weapons or humans, we must
focus on dismantling the entire infrastructure
of the organization, not just on nabbing the
street criminals.
In every investigative area from counterterrorism, to criminal, to cyber, we
in the FBI have come a long way since September
11, 2001.
But there is still much work ahead
of us.
* * *
I want to turn for a moment to the threats we face in the financial crimes arena.
Financial crimes are no longer discrete
entities. Today, financial crime means health care fraud,
mortgage fraud, check fraud, corporate fraud,
money laundering, telemarketing fraud, public
corruption, identity theft, and terrorist
financing.
It has often been said that money is the root of all evil.
I don't know if that's the case, but
I do know that it is the root of terrorism. Terrorists rely on money to fund their training
and operations.
They disguise their fundraising activities
as legitimate charity organizations. They resort to white-collar crime to raise
money. Money
laundering is no longer exclusive to sophisticated
criminals, but is now routine for terrorists.
Money can also be the fruit of terrorism and crime.
Today's terrorists and criminals use
sophisticated business practices to achieve
their goals, not unlike those of legitimate
multinational corporations. Criminals today are not just stealing funds,
they are stealing credit card information,
social security numbers - entire identities
- and selling them for profit.
Those who traffic in humans, drugs,
or weapons are motivated and rewarded by money.
The criminal landscape has changed dramatically since the early days of the FBI.
Our enemies have diversified, and they
make it a point to be unpredictable.
And in today's world, our enemies do
not fall into neatly divided categories. The lines separating crime from terrorism have
blurred.
As financial crimes investigators, it is inevitable that some of your cases will
have a connection to terrorism.
Terrorists, like common criminals,
cannot hide forever in remote corners of the
world. They have to interact with society, particularly
if they intend to strike inside the United
States. They may apply for credit cards and set up
bank accounts.
They may set up illegal money transfer
systems.
They may solicit donations for charities
that are fronts for terrorist organizations. They may steal innocent identities - or create
bogus ones - to set their plans in motion.
* * *
Defeating them will not be easy - but it is critical.
This is why all of you - the Nation's
finest financial crimes investigators - are
so important.
In today's FBI, criminal investigators
scrutinize cases from credit card fraud to
food stamp scams for any nexus to terrorism,
particularly any terrorist-related financing. You do the same. Without money, terrorists cannot carry out their mission. It is our mission and it is your
mission to seize every opportunity to identify
and stop them before they can harm us.
Where appropriate, we need to work
closely.
In this fast-paced and rapidly shrinking world, our challenge is to hold on to
what we know works, while making room for
new and improved investigative techniques
and technologies.
Our mission is to aggressively investigate
and prevent crime and terrorism, while respecting
and protecting the civil liberties of all
Americans. To do this, we must combine the tools of law enforcement with the
tools of intelligence.
We must use the same investigative
capabilities to catch criminals wiring funds
to terrorists that we use to root out corporate
fraud. We
must work locally, but think globally. And we must apply our unique strengths even as we share them and
blend them with those of other agencies.
Success demands our dedication and our continued commitment to working together.
By uniting to fight financial crimes,
we are uniting to protect our fellow citizens
against all threats, from fraudulent telemarketing
to terrorism.
If we continue to work together, we
cannot - and we will not - fail.
Thank you all for taking the time to attend this conference.
Thank you for your outstanding service
to this great Nation.
# # #