Barack Obama in Higher Loyalty, by James Comey
On Civil Rights:
Recruited FBI hiring with 38% non-white new agents
Whether white or black, Latino or Asian, male or female, the annual turnover is about the same--0.5%. Once people experience the environment and the mission at the FBI, they become addicted to it and stay until retirement, despite being paid government
salaries and working under incredible stress. Our challenge, I told the FBI, is to simply get out there and show more people of color and more women (that number had been stuck just below 20% for years) what the place is like and dare them to try to be
part of it. It's not rocket science, I said; the talent is out there. They just don't know what they are missing. So we made it our passion to show them, and in just three years, the numbers started to change in a material way. [In 2015], during my
third year at the FBI, a huge new-agent class at Quantico with 38% non-white. Our standards hadn't changed; we were just doing a better job of showing people the life they could make by joining us, which is contagious in a positive way.
Source: A Higher Loyalty, p.129, by James Comey
Apr 17, 2018
On Crime:
Reduce punishments for some federal offenses
The Obama administration and an interesting alliance of liberal democrats and libertarian Republicans in Congress were working together to reduce punishments for some federal criminal offences. It was one of the only policy areas on which some
self-described Tea Party Republicans and president Obama could agree. I had no heartburn with the specific proposals, which all seemed quite honest and reasonable to me. But a national conversation about murder spikes--and what might be causing it--was
the last thing that advocates of criminal justice reform wanted. I understood that. But I couldn't bear to be silent about the deaths of so many young black men and the possibility that broad changes in human behavior might be some part of that.
So I talked about that subject again, in Chicago, in late October 2015. I talked about the lines of community and police arcing away from each other. Each time somebody interprets the #BlackLivesMatter as anti-law enforcement, one line moves away.
Source: A Higher Loyalty, by James Comey, p.143-4
Apr 17, 2018
On Technology:
Government should decide privacy limits, not companies
The bargain at the heart of our government has always been that privacy matters enormously, but it must yield when the government needs to see into private spaces to protect the community. No large part of America has been entirely off limits to
judicial authority. President Obama was, by background an instinct, a civil libertarian, but he could see the darkness and the danger in talking about privacy as an absolute value. He dove into the issue in 2016, ordering unprecedented scrutiny of
the clash between privacy and security. He said that if we were headed to a place where wide swaths of American life would be judge proof, that wasn't a decision a company should make: only the people should make such a decision.
Unfortunately,
President Obama ran out of time. It was possible to build secure mobile devices and still permit judges to access in appropriate cases, he left office without deciding what to do next, including whether to seek legislation or regulation of some kind.
Source: A Higher Loyalty, by James Comey, p.153-4
Apr 17, 2018
Page last updated: Oct 10, 2018