Dublin, Ireland

Secretary Chertoff: Well, Alan, I want to thank you for that introduction, and I want to thank you all for turning out on what is an exceptionally lovely day here in Dublin. It's my first opportunity to visit Ireland and to be in Dublin, and I can't imagine a better place to kick off my trip to Europe than here at the Institute of European Affairs. And so I appreciate the invitation and the opportunity to address you. I also want to commend the Institute for the outstanding job it does in a host of vital areas relating to European and transatlantic cooperation.

Obviously, the issue of security, the issue of transatlantic relations are very much on everybody's mind, certainly in the United States in the wake of September 11th. But, of course, as we're reminded again and again, this is not just a problem for the United States, it is a problem for the whole world and for the global system.

In August of 2006, you'll of course remember the aborted plot to blow up transatlantic airliners traveling from the United Kingdom to the United States. There obviously have been bombings in London, bombings in Madrid. There are, from time to time, operations rounding up terrorists in various countries -- (inaudible) -- from an emerging threat of terrorism that has an ideological basis, that is perhaps the greatest emerging new threat of the 21st century, and that has replaced the Cold War as a national security matter that is of greatest concern certainly for the United States, but I daresay for the entire civilized world.

I am, in fact, here at the beginning of a trip that will take me to Germany, where I will meet with six of my counterparts from the largest EU-member nations, including Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany, and a couple of other countries. And the purpose of this trip is to participate in an ongoing dialogue that has been part of the EU process for some time, which is the effort to synchronize and find commonality between the various national systems that we have to deal with the threats of terrorism and emerging 21st century national security concerns.

The very fact that I'm making the trip, I think, underscores the theme of my talk today, which is that contrary to some of the myths and legends that surround us, there is, in fact, an increasing convergence in the civilized world in terms of our common view of the threat and our common view of the measures that we need to address the threat of terrorism in the 21st century. So that I think rather than there being a fragmented world and a world in which the United States is viewed as an outlier or a go-it-alone nation, the reality, at least in my domain, which is the domain of what most European countries call the interior ministries, we are seeing increasing cooperation and increasing integration of our approach to protecting all of us. I think that's a very good story not only for security, but for the other things that we cherish and value in the West, including our liberty and our prosperity.

So as I try to outline for you my perception of what we are headed to in this transatlantic relationship and ultimately in the larger global relationship, I want to really address two points in particular.

First, I want to try to be as clear as I can be about the nature of the threat that we face. As we go into what I perceive and I predict will be not just a matter of years but perhaps decades of struggle with an ideology which has been responsible for some heinous acts targeting innocent people, we must have clarity about what it is we are struggling against and what the threat is. That means we cannot take refuge in euphemism or self-delusion. We obviously don't want to foster prejudice or unfairly tarnish or target people with a broad brush. But if we're not candid about the threat that we face, we cannot then ask our own citizens to take the measures that are necessary for our own security.

And then I want to talk about some of the approaches that we are taking to respond to this threat, which I think are a recognition of some of the tools that we now have in the 21st century, which can be a great value in protecting our security, but which also require us to be, again, clear-eyed about some of the myths that are out there concerning invasions of privacy, or oppressiveness, which, I think, if you actually look at what we are doing, not only in the United States but around the world, are actually just that -- myths. They don't reflect what I think is a reasonable balance that is being struck between security and liberty and prosperity.

So what is the threat that we face? Well, I would argue that we, in our -- and when I say "we" I mean not just Americans, I mean all civilized, freedom-loving people -- face a threat that is not merely that of terrorism, which of course is a tactic, but we face a threat that is ideological. It is a world view that is profoundly inimical to the values of tolerance and reason, which characterize much of the way the world is currently evolving, recognizing that there are obviously cultural differences, but seeing underneath those cultural differences a great commonality in the aspiration of people to be treated with dignity, to have freedom, to have reasonable degree of control over their lives, and to have toleration for differences in views and differences in beliefs.

When you talk about what the terrorists -- and I use the term in a very general sense, but I mean, really, the ideology of terrorism that we're confronting -- when we talk about what it is they have in mind, we need look no further than what Osama bin Laden and his henchmen have said very publicly over the last decade, because they have talked again and again about their vision of where they want to take the world. And it is an ideological vision. It is a vision that has a comprehensive world view that looks back over a thousand years of history and perceives a desire to go back to an era of what I would describe as a kind of totalitarianism; a religious-based view of a single, uniform ideology to which everybody has to subscribe, in which the failure to follow this ideology means you're an enemy that should be destroyed or somehow incapacitated.

And in that sense, it's an ideology not very different from what we've seen in the 20th century when we saw fascism and communism as comprehensive world views and ideologies that had a vision of transforming the entire world with a very rigid structure.

In the case of bin Laden and his henchmen, who subscribe to an ideology that some would describe as takfirism -- which is a term that some Muslims use to describe a particular cult within Islam that is intolerant, that is hostile to most Muslims themselves, and that views the ideology as having a license to kill any who disagree -- this ideology of takfirism is a cult that we now see has adherence literally stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean, and covering the entire world.

The essence of this kind of ideology of takfirism is that it does not recognize room for ideological disagreement. And I want to emphasize here that there's a great distinction between this takfirism and the general, mainstream religion of Islam, even with its many different currents, because bin Laden and those who believe in his ideology are quite willing to kill innocent Muslims as well as those of other faiths in the pursuit of their ideology. We have seen from New York to London, from Madrid to Jerusalem, from Baghdad to Bali, that this ideology has not hesitated to carve a bloody trail of death and destruction, leaving orphans and widows of all faiths -- Muslim, Christian and Jewish -- in a service of this vision of heading to a single world under a totalitarian ideology.

Not only do these extremists sacrifice human life, but they also seek to destroy human liberty. Let's not forget that in the run-up to September 11th, when the Taliban were the handmaidens of bin Laden in Afghanistan, the Taliban presented the world with a vision of a society that bin Laden endorsed. It was a society in which women had few, if any, abilities to pursue their own interests, in which education for women was simply not acceptable, in which works of art that represented visions of other faiths, like the great Buddhist statues, were there to be defaced and destroyed, and in which there was simply one road to be followed at the risk of life and limb for those who disagreed.

And it's quite clear that the ideology that bin Laden and the takfiris represent is not an ideology that is subject to debate. They're not interested in debate. Bin Laden himself used the phrase -- or al Qaeda used the phrase -- that what they seek is a "dialogue with bullets and the ideals of assassination, bombing and destruction." And these words, which I quote, come directly from an al Qaeda training manual.

So what I would say is, to be clear about the threat that we face, it is not merely the threat of those who use a tactic, it is the threat of those who subscribe to a totalitarian ideology which seeks to dominate at least large portions of the world, to gain physical control over territory, in order to pursue a single-minded and intolerant vision of the way in which ordinary people should live.

Now, some would say, well, this may be an ideology, but it's a fanciful ideology; there's no realistic prospect of this ideology taking hold, and, therefore, we are exaggerating the nature of the threat. But those who study history and who go back a hundred years to the beginning of the 20th century, when communism and fascism were still in their early stages as ideologies, will remember that then, too, people looking at communism and fascism might have thought that these were not ideologies with any real prospect of gaining a foothold in having power. And, of course, we sadly learned in the second world war that these -- and in the Cold War -- that these ideologies were, in fact, capable of getting control of and holding sway over large areas in the world.

In fact, if we look at the world as it stands today, we see, in portions of Afghanistan, the forces of intolerance continue to contend with the democratic government for control over parts of the territory. We see parts of Pakistan where al Qaeda and the Taliban and other similar groups have carved some safe havens where they seek to recruit, train and conduct their experiments to find ever more dangerous weapons. We see, in areas like Somalia and North Africa, cells growing up that also seek to get control of, if not the whole apparatus of the state itself, portions of states, so that they can set up platforms from which they can mount attacks against their enemies.

So I daresay that although we don't face a threat from al Qaeda now that's comparable to what we think of in World War II when we faced the mighty military machine, it would be a mistake to devalue the significance of this ideology and its capability and its potential, if we look back on history and we see how other ideologies have managed to take hold in states or in portions of states, and continue to be -- elevate themselves as very serious threats to peace and freedom all around the world.

I would say this threat is particularly exacerbated because we live in a world in which technology has given even the individual terrorist much more leverage than was true 20, 50 or 75 years ago: the ability to use the Internet to communicate and create networks; the ability to use technology to develop biological, chemical, even radiological and nuclear weapons. What this has created is the threat that even a small group getting control of a small portion of a state could build laboratories and other facilities that would allow them to put together capabilities that would enable the waging of war on a scale that a hundred years ago required a powerful nation-state.

Even if you look at September 11th itself, in the history of the United States there's no single day on which so many people, so many Americans, were killed in the United States itself. By the measure of resulting impact, it would be hard to seriously regard the attacks of September 11th as anything less than comparable to acts of war. And had the August 2006 airline plots succeeded, there would have also been a comparable loss of life, and a devastating blow against the global system of travel and trade -- again, I would say, commensurate with the kinds of results we see when states wage war, as opposed to the results we see when we deal with what I would call mere criminality.

Now, having laid out at least my view of the threat, I would submit to you that this assessment is actually shared not only by those in the United States, but by those who reside in Western democracies and, in fact, in democracies and countries all around the world. And here is where I'd like to come to the second element of my remarks, which is to talk about how we are dealing with this threat, and suggest to you that increasingly we see a convergence in approaches to attacking the problem of ideologically driven terrorism.

A growing number of countries around the world are coming to agree on three important principles that are fundamental to building a strategy to defend our countries, our people, and our way of life.

The first principle is that for those who seek to exploit globalization to carry out acts of terror, their point of greatest vulnerability is when they come into contact with the sources of law, or the sources of authority around the world. Often this occurs when people cross a border. That's the moment at which the terrorist or the would-be terrorist has to expose himself or herself to the authorities, subjects himself or herself to questioning and a search of bags -- and that's the moment at which they are at greatest risk of being discovered. So that is their point of weakness. And as much as they seek to exploit global travel, trade and communication to network and carry out their acts of terror, so we have to look at these various points of connection and transition as our greatest opportunity to intercept and disrupt those acts of terror before they come to fruition.

What this means is that nations are beginning to realize, in order to protect themselves, they must be willing not only to operate within their own borders and points of entry, but we need to multiply the ways in which we create points of interaction with would-be terrorists so that we increasingly carve out what I would call a "safe space" for freedom-loving and innocent people to move, travel and trade without interference, at the same time that we make it ever more difficult for terrorists to penetrate into that space and carry out their acts of terror.

What that means specifically is we have to integrate our security perimeters so that we can prevent dangerous people from getting into our free movement zones, from boarding our planes, from getting into our sensitive infrastructure. And in fact, if we find ways to push out our security perimeters in a fashion that synchronizes among all of our countries, we can continue to allow the free movement of innocent people, but also create gates that will continually test the ability of terrorists to interfere with our systems, because we multiply those interactions.

A second principle I think all countries are coming to realize is that while security needs to be very much on our mind, we cannot give the public the false promise of absolute safety against any terrorist act. Simply put, there are no guarantees in life, and nobody can promise a complete absence of risk. That's true, of course, in the natural world, as well as in the world of dealing with terrorism.

Those of you who got in your automobiles to drive here today took some measure of risk. You tried to minimize the risk -- and there are speed limits and traffic laws and safety belts to minimize risk -- but to truly eliminate risk, we have to -- let's say, automobile accidents -- we have to eliminate automobiles, or we have to reduce the speed limit to five miles an hour. Plainly, we're not prepared to do that, and that's, I think, a recognition that we all have that risk is an issue to be managed, but it is not an issue that we can completely eliminate. And I think that's a sensible approach that allows us to look at increasing our level of security without compromising the elements of mobility and freedom that make life worth living in our societies.

And finally, I think the common recognition that we are all coming to around the world is that the business of security is a business of partnership. There is no single authority or government agency that has the capability to manage security all by itself. Ironically, because the nature of -- the name of my title, the name of my office, is Secretary of Homeland Security -- ironically, I find much of my work takes place overseas with other countries. Some think that the person in charge of homeland security should be focused only on activities at home, but, in fact, to protect us at home, we need to recognize that we interface around the world, and that at every point at which people travel and trade, there's a duality, both from the home looking out, and from the outside looking into the home -- and that means we have to work in partnership with our friends and allies from all over the world.

I think the principles I've laid out do reflect a consensus. And I think, in very specific terms, we're beginning to see that reflected in the way that we are organizing our security, and the way that security is organized, for example, here in Europe, as well. Fundamentally, the actuating principle here is the recognition that what we need to do is to have a strategy that allows us to prevent bad people from entering our free systems of movement and trade, and making sure that our infrastructure and our critical capabilities are hardened and protected against people who would attack us, even if they managed to penetrate that system.

Unquestionably, this strategy has a lot of challenges. And let me just select one, which I think will be of particular interest to the group here. How do we determine, among the literally tens and hundreds of millions of world travelers, who are the ones that pose threats, entering this system of free movement around the world? And how do we construct a system that allows us to identify and prevent those threats from coming into our system of free movement without so interfering with the general system itself that we break that which we are trying to protect?

In America alone, for example, we welcome about 420 million travelers into the United States every single year. That is a huge number. In fact, 88 million come in by air alone. Only a very small fraction of those people pose a threat. But we also live with the memory that six years ago, 19 such people got on airlines and caused the death of 3,000 people and the destruction of the two tallest buildings in the United States of America. So how do we balance our desire to prevent another 19 or 9 people from coming into the United States to carry out a similar attack, against the fact that we've got to deal with hundreds of millions of people who are passing through our ports of entry every single day?

The critical tool we use is information, and it is the intelligent and selective use of information to manage risk -- which aligns with the principles I spoke of a moment ago -- that represent our principal tactical approach to protecting our country. And here again I'm going to say it's an approach I think increasingly other countries are beginning to adopt. And let me give you some specific examples.

One example concerns the screening of air passengers coming into the United States. Obviously, we have terrorist watch lists that give us the names of people that we know to be terrorists. But we also are quite clear on the fact there are people who are terrorists who are unknown to us, whose identities are not manifest, whose names we do not have on a watch list. And those are the people that we have to be most concerned about because obviously if they slip in the country and carry out an attack, there could be devastating consequences.

What we have learned, though, is that we're not helpless in dealing with the unknown terrorists. And there are a couple of things we can do. First, if we can obtain a few pieces of key, not particularly sensitive or confidential, information about travelers -- in fact, commercial information -- if we can obtain a few pieces of this commercial information, we can literally screen millions of travelers each year and we can identify that comparatively small number that warrant a closer look before they get on an airplane or before they are allowed to enter the United States of America. That's what we call secondary screening. It's our way of separating out from the very large mass of people, most of whom are innocent, those that we need to target for what I would describe as a closer look.

Recently this approach took a giant step forward when we reached an agreement with the European Union, in which we reached a common set of principles on the transfer of what we call Passenger Name Record data from the airline commercial databases to the United States, so we could use that information, again, to more precisely target those that we might want to take a second look at.

This information is, as I say, commercial. It's not particularly sensitive -- we're not interested in the habits that people have in their personal lives -- but information they communicate to the airline about their method of travel and their manner of travel, the way they pay for their ticket, and how they can be reached by telephone has proven again and again to be a critical and effective tool in combating terrorism, and identifying people who would be unknown to us by name, but whose connections certainly warrant that we take a close look before we let them into the country.

And let me give you a couple of examples of how this has paid off for us. In April 2006 at Boston's Logan Airport, our Customs and Border Protection officers were able to use PNR data as a way of red-flagging, or identifying, two passengers whose travel patterns exhibited what we would consider to be high-risk indicators. During the process of secondary interview, which is taking someone aside and asking them some questions before they're admitted, one of the passengers stated that he was traveling to the U.S. on business for a group that is suspected of having financial ties to al Qaeda. The examination of his baggage revealed images of armed men, one of which was labeled mujahideen. Needless to say, these individuals were refused admission. And that's exactly the kind of information we would not have known about if we had not gotten that red flag from the PNR data.

Now, some may, well, perhaps they would not have carried out an attack; maybe they were just here as tourists. Let me give you another example. In June 2003, using PNR data and other analytics, one of our inspectors at Chicago's O'Hare Airport pulled an international traveler aside before they were admitted, again, to put them through a secondary inspection and questioning. And when the secondary officer was not satisfied with the answers he got, he basically refused admission to the traveler and sent him back to his home country in the Middle East. Now, was this person a potential terrorist? Were they going to carry out a terrorist act? Well, what I can tell you is a couple of years later we actually encountered this person again -- or we encountered a portion of this person -- because in combining -- in comparing the fingerprints we took from this individual when they arrived at O'Hare in 2003 with the fingerprints that we found on the steering wheel of a truck bomb in Iraq, we were able to have a perfect match. In other words, the individual that we turned away, two years later was the driver of a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device that killed over 100 people in Iraq. I would venture to say, as someone responsible for managing risk, that it would be an unacceptable risk to allow that person -- or to have allowed that person to enter the United States in 2003.

A second measure that we are using as a way, again, of identifying the unknown terrorist and picking that person out of the general mass of innocent travelers is fingerprints. And I just illustrated a moment ago how helpful fingerprints can be as a forensic tool after an attack has occurred, but they're also useful to prevent an attack.

As we transition to a 10 fingerprint program, where every traveler who comes into the U.S. will have to give us 10 fingerprints on a fingerprint reader, we're going to have the ability for the first time to identify someone entering the U.S. whose name is unknown to us, whose travel data may not reveal any anomalies, but whose latent fingerprints have been found at a safehouse where bombs are being built, or on a battlefield where attacks are being carried out, or in a training camp where radicals and extremists are being trained to carry out acts of violence. By comparing those latent fingerprints, which we are currently in the process of collecting around the world, with the fingerprints that we can take from a traveler, we can identify in very rapid fashion somebody who has clearly been someplace -- at a training camp or a safehouse or a battlefield -- that at a minimum warrants a closer look before that person is admitted.

This is a quantum leap forward in security and, in particular, a quantum leap forward in the case of dealing with the unknown terrorist. And, again, let me give you an example from real life. In the last year we had an instance of an individual who sought a visa. We got their 10 fingerprints. By comparing the fingerprints with latent fingerprints taken from a piece of paper that was found in a safehouse where -- which was part of one of these plots that took place in London -- we found a match. Now, it turned out there was an innocent explanation for why that piece of paper with that fingerprint was in a safehouse where a plot was being carried out, but isn't that exactly the kind of information you would like to know in order to ask someone some further questions, and to determine whether in fact there's a real risk or not?

Now, some are going to say, well, these things are invasions of privacy. I would make the case these things actually enhance privacy. And I come back to that number I gave you at the beginning of this portion of my remarks: 420 million travelers to the U.S. every single year. How are we to pick out from among that large group of innocent people that few people who pose a threat to the United States? Well, of course, what we could do is we could simply let everybody in, not check anybody, and take our chances. That would pretty much raise the risk of an attack to an unacceptably high level.

Another alternative would be the reverse: Stop everybody and put everybody into secondary inspection and questioning. That would have the disastrous result of destroying our international travel system because it would subject every single passenger to an unnecessary and unwarranted period of questioning that would hinder and delay their easy travel from outside the United States into the United States.

Or we can identify that very small minority of people that we are interested in talking to from everybody else. Those people will be subjected to secondary inspection, but everybody else is going to be able to pass unhindered and without being inconvenienced. My argument is, at the end of the day, the vast majority of people have their privacy better honored through that kind of selected targeting system than through a system that simply puts everybody through a secondary screening, or one that simply irrationally hopes that nobody bad is going to come in, and therefore lets everybody come in without any questions at all.

I've talked a little bit about the unknown terrorist, but let me talk about a third measure we are using, which is to deal with the known terrorist and the imposter. Obviously, the key to any watch list that is based on names is to have some clear way of verifying that the person who presents himself at a border or at an airline counter is who he or she represents himself or herself to be. So in addition to gathering information through Passenger Name Records and fingerprints, we want to be able to validate the identity of people who come into the United States. And to do that we have to have secure forms of identification.

We are continuing to expand our capability to get secure forms of identification through a series of measures that we are taking legally in the United States. And one of them is what I call the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative. This is a law that requires that as people travel in the Western hemisphere, including from Canada to the United States, we will restrict the types of identification that are acceptable to a relatively small number, each of which has to be secure, so that we can be confident that when somebody presents themselves at a border with a document that identifies themselves, that document is not forged, is not counterfeit, and that the person who has the document is who they claim to be.

It may surprise people to know that until really, actually, until quite recently, you could travel by air from Canada to the United States or in the Caribbean using one of 8,000 kinds of different documentation -- everything from baptismal certificates to Xeroxed copies of birth certificates -- all of which created an unacceptable risk; that imposters would enter the United States using documents that falsely represented who they were.

By reducing the number of forms of identification and insisting that we get the kind of documentation that is secure and robust and that is only distributed on the basis of a positive identification of the holder, we're going to make it much easier to be confident about the people who come into the United States. And again I would argue it's a net gain for privacy, as well as security, because it means we have to spend less time delaying people and questioning people because we have greater confidence that we know the identity of the people who are coming into the United States of America.

You know, this sometimes raises the issue of what some express concern about as a national identification card. That's obviously a complicated issue, and we do not have a national identification card in the United States, and I don't suggest that we have one here. But what we are moving to in the United States is a set of standards for identification that say, when you present a form of identification to the federal government to gain access to a place or some kind of transportation or to cross a border, that form of identification must meet certain standards. It must be secure enough so that we can have confidence that it cannot easily be fabricated or obtained by people using improper means.

Again I'm going to make the argument that is something that actually helps people maintain their own personal security. It minimizes identity theft. I've heard people argue against having secure standards for driver's licenses, for example. And my question to them is always this: What is the value of privacy that is served by making it easy for people to forge my name on a driver's license so they can pretend to be me and misrepresent themselves to my own personal detriment? Why are we claiming that it's a protection of people's rights to make it easier for criminals and fraudsters, not to mention terrorists, to impersonate those people, damage their credit rating, get into their bank accounts? I haven't heard a persuasive argument yet. And I suggest again that clear-eyed thinking will tell us that having sets of standards for identification that allow us to rely upon them and be confident in them is a net gain for security and for privacy, as well.

I've talked, of course, about what Americans are doing, and I'd like to conclude by talking about how what we are doing is very much a piece with what is happening here in Europe and around the world, because there is a perception that somehow America is an outlier, that America is Big Brother looking to collect information in a way that is at odds with the general trend in Europe and in other free parts of the world. But I think that perception is clearly at odds with reality, for it is precisely in those nations that share our commitment to democratic values and freedom that we see a similar movement to what I would consider to be a reasonable and balanced approach to identifying people who are threats to security.

For example, the United Kingdom has recently announced that it is embarking on an over £1 billion, seven-year eBorders program to establish an integrated biometric and biographic border management system that is virtually identical to what I've described as the United States is doing in its own borders. And Ireland recently announced its intent to deploy a similar program in order to ensure the security of the common travel area between the Irish Republic and the United Kingdom.

The Netherlands, Portugal, Germany, Britain and Malaysia have all pioneered expedited registered traveler programs to allow pre-approved travelers to move quickly through passport control. And this reflects again the kinds of positive vetting programs that we now have in the United States to allow people to cross borders. For years, Australia has managed an electronic travel authorization program to facilitate travel while mitigating many of the risks of the unknown terrorist that I've described. And this electronic travel authorization program is now a concept that we have adopted as part of our movement to reform our visa program to allow more countries into a visa waiver program with greater security for Americans, in terms of knowing who's coming in. And finally, Japan itself began recording -- recently began recording the fingerprints and photographs of all foreign visitors. And this, of course, is consistent with the fingerprinting process that I've described we have deployed at our own borders.

Finally, notwithstanding the controversy that surrounded our negotiation in the Passenger Name Record agreement with the EU earlier this year, I'm delighted to note that earlier this month the EU released a proposed requirement from member states relating to the collection of Passenger Name Record data that is strikingly similar to the arrangement that we have in the United States and that we agreed upon with the European Union.

I would argue that this EU proposal, which I think is quite wise and prudent, builds on the 2004 directive on the use of API, which has already been successfully implemented by Spain, and also builds upon the agreement and the common set of principles we reached with the EU Commission as we put our own program into effect.

What we're seeing, then, in Japan, in Southeast Asia, in Europe, is that many countries around the world are beginning to take a converging approach to the management of intelligence and information to identify those who are a threat to all of our free societies. I don't think this is an accident. I think it recognizes -- it's a recognition by all governments and all people around the world that what the 9/11 Commission pointed out is true: that travelers coming and crossing borders, using phony documents, are a threat to our security and do pose an unacceptable risk of terrorism. And the best way to combat it is by using our capability to manage travel documents and travel information in order to make sure that people don't enter our free space and our area of free movement.

This is heightened as we think about the fact that an Iraqi can now, as press reports indicate, an Iraqi can now pay a criminal network for a fraudulent passport at a cost of 3,000 euros. And a cost of 8,000 euros will get an Iraqi all the arrangements necessary to travel from Iraq to the United States, coming through Europe and Latin America, using phony documents. That capability is one that we have to match and be able to deflect if we're going to continue to be able to behave appropriately in keeping ourselves safe.

So as we seek convergence, I leave you with one thought: we will continue to be in a debate about these measures, and we must continue to fight to make sure that we are adapting these measures for intelligent use of information so that we stay ahead of where the terrorists are. That's why I'm going to Germany to meet with my counterparts this weekend -- to talk about how, in the domain of mutual security, we have to continue to focus on the fundamental principles that unite us: principles that cherish freedom, that cherish the ability of people to travel, that cherish our prosperity; principles that may sometimes reflect themselves somewhat differently in different countries because of various cultural and historical artifacts, but which at a fundamental level reflect a commonality of view of the entire civilized world that is a strong bulwark against terrorism and the ideology of hatred and fear, which I described earlier.

I believe that as Europe continues to move forward to integrate itself with respect to security and the fight against transnational crime, Americans and Europeans will also find an increasing integration and convergence of principles, which will allow us to recognize how very much we are on the same team, fighting the same fight, and to eliminate those who would argue that there are significant differences and divergences in the fundamental principles that actuate our societies and are dealing with these very serious problems.

I look forward to continuing to work with my European colleagues. I look forward to continuing to have this debate about what is the appropriate way to strike the balance between security and liberty, because I believe that as we continue to work together and we find more and more -- and my experience over the last three years certainly reinforces this -- is that we have fundamental shared values in common which allow us to work in the kind of partnership that is going to be essential if we combat terrorism and the threats to freedom and prosperity in this new 21st century.

Thank you very much.