China has national security laws that compel Chinese companies to provide the government with information and access at their government's request. And virtually all Chinese companies of any size are required to have Communist Party 'cells' inside them, to make sure the companies stay in line with the party's principles and policies.
9/11 was a gamechanger in so many terrible ways, not just for the United States and for our own national security apparatus but for the whole world. And those attacks blew apart any notion of separation between foreign and domestic threats, any notion that such attacks only happen to other people in other countries.
The FBI's mission is to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution. To carry out that mission, we're entrusted with a lot of authority, so our actions are subject to close oversight - from the courts, from our elected leaders, and from independent entities like the inspector general.
Our adversaries - terrorists, foreign intelligence services, and criminals - take advantage of modern technology to hide their communications; recruit followers; and plan, conduct, and encourage espionage, cyber attacks, or terrorism to disperse information on different methods to attack the U.S. homeland and to facilitate other illegal activities.
ISIS uses traditional media platforms as well as widespread social media campaigns to propagate its ideology. With the broad distribution of social media, terrorists can spot, assess, recruit, and radicalize vulnerable persons of all ages in the U.S. either to travel to foreign lands or to conduct an attack on the homeland.
If you think about the average person and their interaction with law enforcement, their whole perspective on who we are and what we stand for - our brand, if you will - might be defined by just one interaction or encounter, a traffic stop, a visit to a school, or a response to a call for help.