FBI Director Christopher Wray warned this week that the United States is facing a heightened threat level from foreign terrorist organizations that can exploit the southern border following Hamas’ terrorist attacks against Israel.
Wray testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday and urged them to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, warning that failure to do so would result in the U.S. Intelligence Community being blinded as it tries to identify and neutralize threats.
“Stripping the FBI of its 702 authorities would be a form of unilateral disarmament,” he said, adding that “702 is key to our ability to detect a foreign terrorist organization overseas directing an operative here to carry out an attack in our own backyard.”
He said that failure to reauthorize Section 702 “would be akin to laying bricks to rebuild another pre-911 style wall.”
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Wray said he has never seen a threat environment as unique before where “all the threats or so many of the threats are all elevated all at exactly the same time.”
“So blinking red lights analogy about 9/11, all the lights were blinking red before 9/11, apparently,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). “Obviously all of us missed it. Would you say that there’s multiple blinking red lights out there?”
“I see blinking lights everywhere I turn,” Wray said.
“I am concerned that we are in an elevated threat environment, a heightened threat environment from foreign terrorist organizations for a whole host of reasons,” Wray said. “And obviously their ability to exploit any port of entry including our southwest border is a source of concern. There’s a lot of discussion about numbers and numbers are important, but let’s not forget that it didn’t take a big number of people on 9/11 to kill 3000 people. So while numbers are important, numbers don’t tell the whole story. And we have seen an increase in so-called KSTs, Known or Suspected Terrorists attempting to cross over the last five years.”
Wray said that Iran was “the world’s biggest state sponsor of terrorism” and that it has tried to carry out multiple assassinations on U.S. soil and has launched cyberattacks against children’s hospitals in the U.S. over the last couple of years. He also pointed out China is a major contributor to the fentanyl epidemic that is killing tens of thousands of Americans per year and that Russia is conducting aggressive cyberattacks against the U.S. on a regular basis.