FBI director: Independence Day terror attacks were thwarted

WASHINGTON, July 9 (UPI) -- The FBI thwarted a number of Islamic State-linked terror plots to kill people in the United States during the July Fourth holiday, FBI Director James Comey said Thursday.

Comey told reporters the FBI arrested more than 10 people who had allegedly been recruited online by IS -- also identified as Daesh and by the acronyms ISIS and ISIL.

Not all of the alleged plots involved the Independence Day holiday and not all of those arrested were charged with terror offenses. Comey declined to give details about any of the plans.

"I do believe we disrupted efforts to kill people in connection to the Fourth," Comey said, adding that he thinks a number of American lives were saved.

Comey's statements came one week after the Department of Homeland Security, FBI and National Counterterrorism Center issued a joint intelligence bulletin to law enforcement across the United States warning of threats from extremists tied to the Fourth of July.

Meanwhile, on Wednesday, Comey told Congress IS was using encryption to make sure messages between leaders and recruits are untraceable.

"This is a group of people who use social media to reach thousands and thousands of followers, find the ones who might be interested in committing acts of violence and then moving them to an encrypted, end to end encrypted messaging app," he said.

He called on tech companies for help to find a solution to break encryption codes, allowing law enforcement to monitor this communication with a court order. Apple and Google have both resisted assisting law enforcement in such matters.

"ISIL does something al-Qaida would never imagine: They test people by tasking them," Comey said during the Wednesday hearing. "Kill somebody and we'll see if you are really a believer. And these people react in a way that is very difficult to predict. What you saw in Boston is what the experts say is flash-to-bang being very close. You had a guy who was in touch in an encrypted way with these ISIL recruiters and we believe was bent on doing something on July Fourth. He woke up one morning, June 2, and decided he was going to go kill somebody."