There are certain questions FBI director Robert Mueller III just can't answer.
"I can't get into that," was a popular response given to the Forum Speaker Series' sold-out crowd of more than 100 faculty and staff yesterday.
But, in part to recruit future FBI agents, he divulged what he could, first promoting the amenities of the job.
"For those of you who join the FBI, you get a badge, a gun and a black van," he said.
Surrounded by FBI agents and a security detail, the professional secret-keeper's deep voice echoed through Beaver Stadium's Mount Nittany Club as he examined ways to combat cyber crime.
Conjuring images of Carl Sandburg's poem "Fog," Mueller personified the information superhighway as coming "into our lives on little cat feet ... unannounced, too subtle to be noticed at first, and then, seemingly overnight, impossible to ignore."
"The fog of cyberspace has nearly enveloped us. And it is by no means sitting silently," he said.
Penn State, he said, is key in patrolling that fog, through annual grants reaching $150 million in defense research, the newly established Center for the Study of Terrorism and Penn State President Graham Spanier heading the FBI's National Security Higher Education Board.
"We knew it wouldn't be an easy sell because of the perceived tension between law enforcement and academia," he said of the initiative. "But once we briefed [Penn State] President Graham Spanier on the national security threats that impact you here at Penn State ... it became clear to all of us why this partnership is so important."
He continued to detail those perceived threats, citing "botnets," robot networks controlled by hackers, as a weapon of choice -- the "Swiss Army knives of cyber crime."
"A member of our cyber team describes it as having an invisible man in the room, standing over your shoulder, seeing and hearing everything you do, watching every word you type," he said. "And you may never know he is there, who he represents or how much damage he has done."
More damaging may be the ability of the Internet to propagate terrorist activity, serving as a marketing tool, moneymaker, training ground and town square for thousands of extremists worldwide, Mueller said.
He detailed cases like that of Younis Tsouli, a 22-year-old London student who hacked into servers around the world, creating detailed instructions on how to build bombs, videos of beheadings and a YouTube for terrorists called "You bomb it."
"We cannot protect the United States by ourselves," he said. "Our success is dependent on these relationships."
In addition to the Penn State partnership, Mueller said the FBI uses its InfraGard program to host neutral forums for companies to discuss threats to their security and accepts other universities as the "creators of knowledge, not merely the disseminators."
Likening the Internet to Rome's 52,000 miles of roads, he warned that the "enemies, as they say, are at the gates."
"But the invaders, those whose intent is not enlightenment, but exploitation and extremism, are marching right down those same roads to attack us in multiple ways," he said. "We must rely on our agility, our resourcefulness and our resolve to stop them together."
