Menendez: My thoughts and prayers are with the people of Brussels and Belgium and it is an example of the challenge of the world we live in. When people are willing to strap a bomb onto themselves and give up their lives instead of what is human nature, which is to live in the name of Allah, then that is a challenge for our security both here at home and abroad. It’s also an example of why I believe we need to do everything we can to disrupt the Islamic State in its headquarters because giving it command and control abilities from which is can direct attacks is something we cannot permit or sustain and so it’s a reminder and also a challenge that we have to take up in order to ensure that we never face that challenge at home.
Hill: What does it say about our intelligence network, senator, when at least two of these attackers in the Brussels attack were known to the police, but not known in a way that they were on any terror watch lists? They weren’t known to be terrorists or anything like that.
Menendez: Well, that’s a story that’s still developing, but there’s a difference between someone who may have committed a crime, in what we might consider a common crime, but isn’t necessarily linked to terrorism and that doesn’t get you on the terrorist list. But this is the challenge that we need to have the ability to have the most sophisticated intelligence of all different forms — human intelligence, signal intelligence, which means we intercept suspected conversations with reasonable cause, probable cause and everything else we can do in sharing that information across agencies and across boundaries in the world in order to meet the challenge we have which is this. That, for us, as a nation, we have to get it right 100 percent of the time. The terrorists only have to get lucky once. And when someone individually who may have no history wants to strap on a bomb and blow themselves up at a train station or an airport, that’s a high burden to meet, but it is our burden and our challenge and that’s why I’ve been working so hard to improve our intelligence systems so that we can prevent the individuals who might commit such an act before it happens.
Hill: As you have worked to improve the intelligence system to give law enforcement more tools we’re up against, as a society right now technology makers who are making encrypted devices when law enforcement can’t access that information.
Menendez: This is going to be one of the great societal debates we have to have right now because we believe in privacy. I certainly do.
Hill: What do you suggest we do about that?
Menendez: I think that when you get, when you have probable cause and you can get a judge to say to you, in the case of the San Bernardino attackers, their attack was done. It is incredible for me to understand that the company won’t give the government the opportunity to unlock that particular phone, even if they’re the ones unlocking it and they don’t want to share the technology then they should be obligated to unlock it so that in fact we could find information that could find others that could prevent other attacks. So, it seems to me that we can have the rule of law, we can have privacy, but we can also have a situation in which a company doesn’t have to give up their technology, but has to use their technology, when they get a court order to open up that individual’s information so that we can prevent future attacks.