FBI Director Christopher Wray said terror attacks have been thwarted in at least three major U.S. cities in the last year.
Wray’s comments came on the anniversary of the Sept. 1, 2001, terrorism attacks. He made his remarks during an interview on “CBS This Morning.”
“In the last year, or so, we've thwarted attacks in San Francisco on the pier,” he said. “We've prevented an attack in a shopping mall in Miami. We prevented an attack in Cleveland on the July Fourth holidays, where there would have been thousands of people to celebrate our freedom.”
Wray and the Joint Terrorism Task Force, which includes the FBI and other federal, state and local agencies, gets about 15,000 tips a year.
And he said the FBI is better able to handle terrorism investigations than it was 17 years ago.
“Well, I would say this, we are dramatically better positioned,” he said.
“So, I think the threat, today's terrorism threat, still includes sleeper cells, al-Qaida, all the kind of major terrorist organizations that you would think of, but we're also very focused now on homegrown violent extremists, which are people who are largely here already, in the United States. And these are people who are largely radicalized online.
“Terrorism today moves at the speed of social media. The part of it is engaging with social media companies in a way to try to get them to do certain things they can do voluntarily."
A commemoration of the September 11 terror attacks at the World Trade Center in New York began at 8:46 a.m. on Tuesday – the time the first hijacked plane slammed into the north tower.
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