ウィスパリング同時通訳研究会コミュのA Conversation with FBI Director Wray and National Security Lawyers on Civic Education as a National

JOHN J. HAMRE: Good afternoon, everybody. My name is John Hamre. I’m the president here at CSIS. And I want to welcome you to what’s going to be a very, very interesting conversation. This is a continuation of the series we’re doing on the national security imperative for civics education. That may sound odd, but during the last year we’ve all experienced startling things about how we need to reinforce the importance of civics and civics understanding American society.
It’s a national security imperative and we’re really grateful that today we have the privilege to have the director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, with us. I will not – his time is limited, so I’m going to be just very brief to say how grateful we are he’s devoted his lifetime to law enforcement and public service. He has had the opportunity to be in the private sector, but we keep pulling him back. And it’s because every time he is in public life, we’re all benefitting from it. You all take a look at his resume yourself, but I don’t want to take any more time.
Director Wray, your service is so valuable to the country. We’re so grateful you’re willing to share your time with us today. Thank you. Let me turn to you.

CHRISTOPHER WRAY: Well, thank you, John. I appreciate the kind words. And I of course appreciate the chance to talk about the importance of civic education to our national security and to the FBI’s work. I thought maybe I’d offer a few initial thoughts to sort of set the table, and then I look forward to having more of a conversation with Suzanne.
I think maybe the best place for me to start is to define what at least I think of as civic education. And I’m reminded of something that President Reagan said in his farewell address, when he spoke about the need for what he called an informed patriotism, one that’s grounded in thoughtfulness and knowledge. And that strikes me as a pretty good shorthand for what civic education should do, create informed patriots who know our history and actually understand how our democratic institutions work.
So how does civic education intersect with our national security, and specifically with the FBI’s work? Really in a whole bunch of ways, I think. But for the purposes of our conversation, I think I’d highlight two in particular. First, it intersects with some of the threats the FBI and out nation confront today. And second, it can shape how we do our work. So let me take each of those in turn.
One example of how civic education affects a current national security threat is election security, and more broadly the problem of malign foreign influence, which has been a top concern for the FBI recently. We’re the lead federal agency for identifying and combating malign foreign-influence operations that target U.S. democratic institutions and values, things like the rule of law, free and fair elections, an independent judicial system, and freedom of speech and of the press.
Our adversaries are doing all they can to undermine those institutions and to confuse and divide Americans by spreading disinformation, especially through social media. So the FBI has been working very hard to combat those efforts, along with our partners in government and, very importantly, the private sector. And we’ve actually had a good deal of success.
But at the end of the day, no amount of FBI investigating can, by itself, sufficiently insulate our country from this threat. Ultimately our best defense is a well-informed public, citizens who are thoughtful, discerning consumers of all the information that’s out there and who have a solid understanding of how our democratic institutions work. An American public of informed patriots will be a lot more resilient against these malign-influence efforts. And that in turn will make it a lot harder for our adversaries to succeed.
The second place that I was referring to, where civic education intersects with the FBI’s mission, concerns how we do our work of protecting the American people. One thing I’ve really been trying to stress to our folks since I started in this job is the importance of process, of making sure we always do the right thing, yes, but do the right thing in the right way.
We can’t carry out the FBI’s mission without the trust and support of the American people. So we have to make sure that we’re always doing our work in a way that’s professional, objective, and that earns, that justifies, that trust and support.
Another way to put it is that when people ask the FBI to do something, I think there is and should be a unique expectation that it’s going to get done right, in every sense of that word. We’re the people others turn to when it’s particularly important that something get done right. And the more important it is, the more people turn to us with that expectation. And that confidence is at the heart of a lot of things we do, like our public-corruption investigations or our civil-rights investigations. And it’s a trust that the FBI cannot afford to lose.
So I think civic education comes into play here too, because a well-informed public will have a better understanding of what the FBI really does, and why and how we actually do it. And that kind of understanding, I would argue, is important for really any government agency, but it’s especially important for us because we’ve been given such broad powers.
Citizens need to know, is the FBI upholding the Constitution and the rule of law? Are we – to come back to the phrase I used before, are we doing the right thing in the right way? So take something like our surveillance work, which is crucial for us in catching corrupt public officials, child predators, foreign spies, and terrorists. The FBI can’t surveil someone just because we want to. We have to go to an independent judge to show evidence of probable cause and get a warrant.
Or take our FISA authorities. FISA has been in the news a lot over the last couple of years. If we suspect someone is a foreign spy or terrorist and we want to listen to their phone calls or read their emails, we’ve got to present evidence and get a warrant from the FISA court to do that.
When citizens have a good understanding of the Fourth Amendment and how warrants work and the safeguards we’ve got in place, they’ll have that much more confidence the FBI is using that tool appropriately. And obviously if we’re not doing things the right way, an informed public will be better prepared to hold us accountable for that.
The last point I’ll make is that to me civic education is important for helping our FBI workforce understand both the importance of our mission and of doing things in the right way. So when we’re hiring, we’re looking for those informed patriots, obviously. And once they’re actually on board, their training involves some things that you might think of as almost an ongoing civic education.
So, for example, all our new agents and intelligence analysts at Quantico visit the 9/11 Memorial and Museum in New York. We want them to understand the magnitude of what happened to our country that day, how it changed the Bureau and how crucial our counterterrorism work remains almost two decades later. They also visit the Holocaust Museum to experience in a kind of gut level way the horror of what can happen when people in government abuse their power, and they visit the Martin Luther King Memorial here in D.C. as a reminder of how the FBI itself hasn’t always used our authority in the right way.
All of these things drive home, each in its own way, the stakes of our work at the FBI, the sheer impact we can have, good or bad, on all the citizens who are counting on us. And so if our employees can recognize the abuse of power and understand how our own organization has sometimes fallen short, they’ll be less likely to make those same mistakes.
So those are a few reasons, from our perspective at the FBI, why civic education is critical to our national security, and I’d be happy to drill into some of these topics with Suzanne more deeply here in a second. But thanks again for inviting me and for focusing on this issue, which I think is incredibly important.

SUZANNE SPAULDING: Director Wray, thank you for those terrific remarks. And for those who are watching, I am Suzanne Spaulding. I’m the senior advisor here at the Center for Strategic and International Studies where I lead the Defending Democratic Institutions Project. And I want to echo Dr. Hamre’s welcome to all of you to this latest installment in the year-long strategic dialogue that we have been hosting on civics as a national security imperative, which is made possible by funding from Craig Newmark Philanthropies.
Director Wray, in your remarks today you talked about the threat of foreign malign influence and disinformation. Now, for the last three years, the Defending Democratic Institutions Project that I lead here at CSIS has been working to understand and counter adversary attacks on our democracy and our democratic institutions with a particular focus on Russian disinformation that undermines public trust in our justice system, including courts and law enforcement.
You and your team have been looking at this for quite some time. How dangerous do you think these information operations, disinformation from our adversaries – how seriously should we be taking this?

MR. WRAY: We take it extremely seriously. You know, at the end of the day, part of what I would consider a crucial component of America’s strength and credibility in the world and the strength of our country internally turns on trust in government and understanding of government. And especially given the challenge of combating misinformation with social media these days, it’s that much more elusive a target to go after.
I mean, the FBI is not – and this gets back to the whole civics thing – the FBI is not and can’t be the truth police. We can identify foreign actors and go after them and take certain steps within our authorities and working with others to prevent them from spreading disinformation. But we can’t roam around social media looking for things that might be false and then correcting them.
There is a role for that but that’s not the FBI’s role, and that’s why I said in my opening comments how important I think having a thoughtful discerning public is because that’s really the best insulation we can have against what you, I think, rightly are focused on as a very serious threat.

MS. SPAULDING: Well, and the challenge that you face is further complicated by the trend that we’ve seen. You know, in 2016, Russia focused on manufacturing content at the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, Russia. But, increasingly, they’ve moved towards simply amplifying domestic voices and, indeed, domestic disinformation has become a more and more significant part of the problem. So how does that complicate the task that the FBI faces?

MR. WRAY: Well, it complicates it enormously. On the one hand, disinformation is not a new thing. The Russians and other countries have been involved in it for decades. But what is relatively new is the role of social media in particular in amplifying, to use your word, that threat. It provides a bullhorn that is, you know, scalable, cheap, and incredibly effective.
And so, again, trying to figure out ways to get the American public to be thoughtful about what it’s reading, what the source of the information is, getting your news from multiple sources, all those sorts of things become incredibly important to insulating us against that threat. But it’s going to take a whole of government and whole of society, really. And that’s not a phrase that I just rattle off lightly. If there’s a role for the government, different agencies, there’s a role for the private sector, especially in the technology industry in particular. But there’s also a role of every American in guarding against the threat you’re talking about.

MS. SPAULDING: Yeah, absolutely. And a threat it is. I mean, you talked about how seriously you take it. And I think we certainly saw with the events of January 6th how dangerous, you know, some of the misinformation, disinformation online can be in terms of manifesting itself in the real world. And you put out a statement on January 7th in which you talked about we do not tolerate violent agitators and extremists who use the guise of First Amendment protected activity to incite violence and wreak havoc. Such behavior betrays the values of our democracy.
And you have testified repeatedly about what a significant challenge domestic terrorism is in our country today. And, you know, as we talk about ways in which we work to counter efforts to undermine trust in our institutions, it seems to me you do, again, have a significant challenge. How do you convince the American public and how do you think about the need to robustly address this threat of domestic terrorism – of domestic violent extremism – while maintaining that public trust that you spoke about, that you’re doing things the right way, consistent with our values and the Constitution?

MR. WRAY: So this is obviously something that’s very much top of mind the last couple years, and certainly the last couple months. You know, as you say, we need to make sure we’re going about it in the right way. And that – part of that, in the context of domestic terrorism, is making sure people understand that our focus, the FBI’s focus, is on violence and criminal activity, not First Amendment expression, no matter how abhorrent, despicable, hateful, or anything else that rhetoric or expression might be. There is a role for calling out hateful rhetoric. It’s just not the FBI’s role. What we’re about is going after – when that ideology, rhetoric manifests itself in violence or criminal activity.

And the more people understand that that’s what we’re going to do, the more they can have confidence that they’ll be protected, but that also their constitutional rights will also be protected. You know, I keep using this phrase, “in the right way.” That not only applies, though, to what the FBI does and how we do what we do, but I would argue in the context of domestic terrorism it applies to the American public. And by that I mean, there is a right way to express your disagreements with an election, or your unhappiness with the court system, or the criminal justice system. That’s part of what our country is founded on. But violence against law enforcement, and government officials, and destruction of federal property is not the right way to express those views.

And we have to have zero tolerance for that. And I think the more people understand this concept of “the right way,” you know, I find that we are in a world in which people are fixated almost to a fault on results. And so what that ends up meaning is that – if your standard for whether you trust a government institution is whether it yields the result you want, we’re heading down a dangerous road. So if you’re standard for whether you trust an election is whether your candidate won, there are going to be a whole lot of people that are going to be disappointed every single time. If your standard for whether you trust the court system or the criminal justice system is whether a particular person got convicted or acquitted, same thing.
The more people understand how these institutions work, how they do what they do, the limitations they have, et cetera, the more likely there is to be trust in those institutions, which in turn hopefully addresses some of the drivers of the violent extremism that we’ve seen manifested not just on January 6th but in different ways over the summer as well.

MS. SPAULDING: Yeah. I think that’s such a great point. And I like the way you describe the results – or the objective of civics education to create informed patriots who are able to be thoughtful and critique the system and institutions, you know, while working to make our country stronger to bring about changes. And it does seem to me that, you know, what we’re seeing in the decline of civic education, it’s not just what surveys show about how many people can’t name the three branches of government, but as you say that how those branches work, how our institutions are designed to work, and importantly how individuals must play a role in holding them accountable and empowering individuals to be effective agents of change. And so what would you say to folks who are hearing this and who are thinking, OK, how can I as an individual help hold the FBI accountable for living up to the oath that all of us take?

MR. WRAY: Well, I think, you know, one is understanding that very little of what we do at the FBI lends itself to a 10-second soundbite or a 150-character tweet. It’s nuanced. It’s complicated. It’s meaningful. And so getting your news about the FBI, just like I would recommend about just about everything else, from a variety of sources and being thoughtful about it would be a good start.
In addition, with the FBI in particular, in every one of our 56 field offices – so everyone listening in on this has a field office that would be the closest to them – we have something called the FBI Citizens Academy, which takes the concept that I just articulated kind of to the next level, where you can become part of a group of citizens, and it takes about a year, and you meet, you know, a few times a year, and you get educated in a much more substantive way about what we do. Then you stay involved as alumni. And there are citizens from a variety of jobs and roles in the community, and like I said, it’s happening all over the U.S. and has been happening for a number of years now. So we in a sense are trying to cultivate our own group, if you will, around the country of informed patriots who understand what the FBI does. And then you know the right questions to ask, you know when we’ve screwed up if we do screw up, and you’re better able to call us on it.

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