The FBI — which once systematically and illegally sought to destroy the lives of black leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. — has racism licked. At least according to its director.
The director, James B. Comey, declared in a visit Tuesday afternoon to the agency’s headquarters that that unfortunate past is behind the agency.
But he said the agency does have a “diversity problem” — too few black and Latino special agents, and getting fewer.
His solution: Do a better job letting “talented” people of all backgrounds know what a wonderful place the FBI is to work.
Comey, who held a press conference at the FBI’s Grove Street headquarters, was asked the question in light of an address he gave at Georgetown Unviersity in the wake of the Ferguson riots. In that speech, Comey spoke of the need of all law enforcement agencies to wrestle with racism in their midsts. He alluded to the FBI itself, which through a program called COINTELPRO planted fake letters and used other illegal means to prevent anyone from King to Malcolm X to any member of the Black Panthers from becoming the next black “Messiah,” in part by destroying their reputations and inciting violence among fellow members of activist groups.
“[A]ll of us in law enforcement must be honest enough to acknowledge that much of our history is not pretty. At many points in American history, law enforcement enforced the status quo, a status quo that was often brutally unfair to disfavored groups,” Comey said in that February speech. (Read it here and watch it above.) “There is a reason that I require all new agents and analysts to study the FBI’s interaction with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and to visit his memorial in Washington as part of their training.”
Asked Monday if the FBI still has an internal problem with racism, Comey responded, “No. No.”
“There’s a racism problem in all human beings. We all have to stare at that and acknowledge that part of our humanity,” he said at a press conference at the Grove and State street headquarters. But “I think the FBI’s in a very good place.”
The problem is that not enough “people of color” happen to know that. The percentage of special agents of color “has dropped for more than a decade,” Comey reported.
He has “stared” at this “diversity problem” “pretty hard,” he said. He has concluded: “I’ve got to get folks interested. I’ve got to get out there and get talented men and women … to give us a shot. And if you do, almost nobody leaves.”
(Some black agents have disagreed about discrimination at the FBI and filed lawsuits like this one.)
ISIL Twitter Threat
Paul Bass Photo
At Monday’s press conference, which followed a meeting with local top cops (including New Haven Chief Dean Esserman and Assistant Chiefs Anthony Campbell and Al Vazquez, pictured to the director’s left), Comey spoke at length about how the fight against terrorism has changed over his 20 months at the helm.
He blamed Twitter.
ISIL — aka the Islamic State, aka ISIS — uses the social network to identify and link up with potential terrorists whom the group then follows up with through encrypted sites, Comey said.
As a result, the enemy is “harder to see” and track than ever before.
“A “chaotic spider web” is the way that I describe it,” Comey said. (Click on the video at the top of the story to watch him address the subject.) “They have a group of tweeters who are based in Syria reaching out trying to reach troubled souls anywhere in the English-speaking world, including here in the United States, asking them to do one of two things: First, travel to Syria, to their so-called Caliphate. And if you can’t travel, kill somebody. Kill somebody in uniform, either in law enforcement or in the military. If you can videotape it, best of all. Kill somebody in our name.
“This is a tremendous change in the way the terrorist thereat comes. In the good old days, which was 20 months ago, our mission in dealing with terrorism on the internet was to find the locations on the internet — where terrorists and would-be terrorists gathered … Twitter has changed all that. Because it is not a watering hole, a central gathering point. It’s the spider web. … ISIL will meet somebody on Twitter, and if they appear to be a live one. will move them to an encrypted form of communication. So the needle I was looking for becomes invisible.”
Comey said that traditional due-process rules for investigating groups like ISIL haven’t kept up with the technology: “The advent of universal strong encryption increasingly makes me with the lawful process, with a court order, unable to see the criminal or terrorist activity that’s going on. That is a problem we as a democracy have to confront and talk about before we drift to a place we will be sorry we drifted to.”
The director was asked to elaborate on what kind of due-process changes he’d like to confront and discuss.
“I am in love with the Fourth Amendment and the Fifth Amendment, as is my organization,” he responded. “I like that I have to go to a judge, make a show of probable cause based on sworn affidavits before I can get an order to intercept anybody’s communications, or to search a device that we have seized that is locked. What I think we have to discuss is: How do we accommodate that rule of law-based investigation with all of our desire to have privacy?
“How do we reconcile that conflict? It’s more of a technological challenge, frankly, than it is a rule of law challenge.”