About John Ashcroft: John David Ashcroft is an American attorney and politician who served as the 79th U.S. Attorney General (2001–2005), in the George W. Bush Administration. He later founded The Ashcroft Group, a Washington D.C. lobbying firm.
We've got to understand that the whole nature of the way American democracy guards its freedom has been changed.
Nothing remains great without a capacity to change and to accommodate the conditions of a changing world.
Agents need to be free to pursue investigations in ways that they haven't. There have been restraints that a reformed FBI needs to make sure we don't impose.
All of us want to have meaning in our lives and want to feel like we're doing something that makes a difference. I believe we're doing that in the Justice Department.
An FBI agent ought to be able to surf the net and look for sites that instruct people how to make bombs.
I don't play full court anymore. I just play half-court.
If necessity is the mother of invention, it's the father of cooperation. And we're cooperating like never before.
It doesn't help to wait until something happens and then prosecute the offenders, especially if it's the idea of the offender to extinguish himself in the commission of the crime.
Nothing that we have authorized conflicts with any law regarding privacy or any provision of the constitution.
People who commit crimes should be responsible for those crimes. It doesn't matter whether they're priests or ministers or atheists.
Prior to September 11, we thought the world beyond our shores was one world of risk and the world in our continent was another world of risk.
Reasonable regulations regarding the ownership of weapons are appropriate.
The FBI has long been a part of the security for the nation's banks because bank robberies have been a priority.
The FBI. is a massive culture. It's been a culture that served America well, and it's been focused on prosecution. But what we need in terms of terrorism is prevention.
The Internet provides very serious challenges to our ability to keep from children the kinds of things that are destructive to them.
The new rule says that the FBI has the right to go to public places on the same terms and conditions as other members of the public for counter-terrorism purposes.
The Patriot Act allows and provides a basis for an exchange of information.
The way the terrorist is trained to operate, especially the suicide terrorists, makes punishment and the threat of punishment far less valuable to those who would prevent the crime.
There is no priority higher than the prevention of terrorism.
We have to think outside the box, inside the Constitution, find ways to do things that will elevate our security, reduce the risk of the incidence of terrorist attack.
