No evidence San Bernardino shooters were part of terror cell: Federal Bureau of Investigation chief

And today, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation said the jihadist sentiments in question were actually conveyed in “private direct messages”-in other words, that Malik’s views weren’t discussed openly at all and would not have been caught by any review process”.

The FBI and the Homeland Security Department have been under fire in recent days for allowing Malik to come to the United States, putting President Barack Obama’s administration on the defensive after news reports surfaced about her radical social media posts.

Eric Snowden may scoff at this point, but Comey said Wednesday, “We don’t intercept the communications of Americans…without predication, without probable cause or belief that they are involved in terrorism or serious criminal activity”, he said.

There is no indication that the couple, killed in a shootout hours after the San Bernardino massacre, had direct contact with terror organizations, Comey said.

Previously, sources close to the investigation within the FBI reported that Malik posted a pledge of allegiance to the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, on Facebook shortly before the attack took place.

“To my mind, there’s no doubt that the Chattanooga killer was inspired and motivated by foreign terrorist organisation propaganda”, he said, but did not specify any particular group. “These communications are private messages, not social media messages”. He said the threat from the Islamic State group has not changed – but it’s vastly different from how terror cells operated around the time of the September 11 attack.

Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina called for Silicon Valley experts to get involved in the fight against terrorism, while frontrunner and real-estate billionaire Donald Trump said he would shut down portions of the Internet to root out Islamic State’s online strongholds.

While he declined to identify the social network, US law enforcement officials have said the messages were exchanged through Facebook.

Tashfeen Malik, left, and Syed Farook.

The threat posed by ISIS is both “dispersed and “very hard to see”, Comey said”. “Whether someone, a relative, saw something and failed to report it, I’m not ready to go there yet”, he said.

The messages were also, Comey said, general in nature-about a commitment to jihad, rather than about specific plots.