By Allan Lengel
ticklethewire.com
PHILADELPHIA — Recently minted FBI Director Christopher Wray said Sunday at the annual International Association of Chiefs of Police conference in Philadelphia that one of his immediate goals is to restore “calm and stability to the bureau.” He also expressed grave concern about the difficulty of getting access to thousands of cell phones in criminal cases due to encryption and privacy issues, a problem often referred to as “going dark.”
“In the first 11 months of this fiscal year alone, we were unable to access the content of more than 6,900, that six-thousand-nine-hundred, mobile devices using appropriate and available technical tools even though we had the legal authority to do so. ”
“Each one of those 6,900 mobile devices is tied to a specific subject, a specific defendant, a specific victim, a specific investigation. That’s more than half …..of all the mobile devices that we attempted to access in that time frame. And that’s just the FBI.”
He called it a horrible situation that needs to be resolved.
The FBI director traditionally speaks to the attendees of the conference, who come from around the world, and ex-Director James Comey would have attended this year’s event had he not been fired.
Wray, who calmly delivered a half hour speech, and fielded questions afterwards, got a standing ovation.
The former federal prosecutor talked about the need for the FBI to cooperate with local law enforcement and said he was pleasantly surprised to see how well the bureau had been doing in that area. He emphasized that the FBI was there to assist local law enforcement.
Wray also assured the crowd he was determined to carry out the mission of the FBI with integrity “no matter the test.”
It wan’t clear if he was talking about the general challenges of the job, or the difficulties he may face serving a president who fired his predecessor.
He said he planned to bring calm and stability to bureau “by staying laser focused on the mission and on the work itself, day in, day out, left foot, right foot, grinding away, following the rules, following the law, following the guidelines trying to make sure that we’re dong the right thing but in the right way, treating everybody with respect. “
