Many of us develop different flavors of cynicism that we work hard to resist because they can be lazy mental shortcuts.

If you've ever talked to a special agent that you know well, and you ask he or she about a dangerous encounter they were involved in, they'll almost always give you the same answer: 'Yeah, I did it, but I was scared to heck the whole time.'

In 1983, my second year of law school, I became the only white player in the Ogden Park Basketball League at 65th and Racine. My teammates joked that I integrated the league, which I guess is true. They weren't so much focused on integration as on winning, and they knew you can't teach height. 'He can't jump, but he sure is tall.'

Each FBI employee understands that to defeat the key threats facing our nation, we must constantly strive to be more efficient and more effective. Just as our adversaries continue to evolve, so, too, must the FBI.

I don't know if it's true or not that folks are less likely to tell police when they see things.

As so often happened during the dot-com bubble days, the revenues that AOL and PurchasePro were counting on did not materialize. And instead of confronting that harsh reality, AOL and PurchasePro cooked up a scheme to inflate PurchasePro's revenues.

We can only query against that which we have collected. And so if someone has never made a ripple in the pond in Syria in a way that would get their identity or their interest reflected in our database, we can query our database until the cows come home, but there will be nothing show up because we have no record of them.

When I worked as a prosecutor in Richmond, Virginia in the 1990s, that city, like so much of America, was experiencing horrific levels of violent crime. But to describe it that way obscures an important truth: for the most part, white people weren't dying; black people were dying. Most white people could drive around the problem.

The need for reflection and restraint of power is what led Louis Freeh to order that all new agent classes visit the Holocaust Museum here in Washington so they could see and feel and hear in a palpable way the consequences of abuse of power on a massive, almost unimaginable scale.

We have built as a government something called the National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force, NCIJTF, where 19 federal agencies sit together and divide up the work. See the threat, see the challenge, divide it up and share information.

Martha Stewart is being prosecuted not for who she is but what she did.

Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.

As all of our lives become digital, the logic of encryption is all of our lives will be covered by strong encryption, and therefore all of our lives - including the lives of criminals and terrorists and spies - will be in a place that is utterly unavailable to court-ordered process. And that, I think, to a democracy should be very, very concerning.

Our obligation is to refuse to let bad win, to refuse to let evil hold the field.

Encryption threatens to lead all of us to a very dark place.

The people of the FBI are sworn to protect both security and liberty. It isn't a question of conflict. We must care deeply about protecting liberty through due process of law, while also safeguarding the citizens we serve - in every investigation.

Stuff doesn't matter - boats, cars, fancy things don't matter. What matters, what will matter to me, is the love of the people around me, and did I take a chance? Did I seize an opportunity to do something for people with the talents that I was lucky enough to be given? Did I make a difference in the lives of people who needed me?

The fact of the matter is that the United States faces real threats from criminals, terrorists, spies, and malicious cyber actors.

For me, law school was a time of joy and hope. Joy in learning my way around the law - learning how to orbit a problem and to ask myself hard questions and to be asked hard questions. Hope that I could be of some use, to be part of the greater good - to make the world a little bit better.

Only a crazy person wouldn't fear approaching a car with tinted windows during a late-night car stop, or pounding up a flight of stairs to execute a search warrant, or fast-roping from a helicopter down into hostile fire. Real agents, like real people, feel that fear in the pit of their stomachs.

Undisclosed and illegal payments, kickbacks, and bribes became a way of doing business at FIFA.

Public corruption is the FBI's top criminal priority. The threat - which involves the corruption of local, state, and federally elected, appointed, or contracted officials - strikes at the heart of government, eroding public confidence and undermining the strength of our democracy.

The spine of the FBI is the rule of law. The spine of the FBI is a commitment to doing the right thing, in the right way, while protecting civil liberties.

We face cyber threats from state-sponsored hackers, hackers for hire, global cyber syndicates, and terrorists. They seek our state secrets, our trade secrets, our technology, and our ideas - things of incredible value to all of us. They seek to strike our critical infrastructure and to harm our economy.