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And how the government communicates about homeland security is central to how the public responds.

It is vital that the United States maintains open lines of communication with our allies. We must assure them of our commitment to eradicating global terrorism wherever it may reside or wherever it's given haven.

The federal government has a responsibility to protect all Americans from potential terrorist attack.

The right to communicate is a basic human right, and I believe that putting that on every national agenda is very important.

Americans rightly asked, if this is the way our government responds to a natural disaster it knew about days in advance, how would it respond to a surprise terrorist attack? How would it respond to an earthquake?

The American people should be informed about what kind of capability terrorists have inside the United States. They should be informed of why we are not using information to do a more effective job of dealing with terrorists.

Every single means of communication amongst the public, the government has antennae into, to find out who is liable to be sympathetic and who is not liable to be sympathetic, and I think this has probably been going on since all channels of communication began.

The sad fact is that the same terrorist scenarios, if they occurred in five different States, there could be five different sets of responses to the American people. We need, at a minimum, a level of coordination on communicating threats to the public.

I think if we're going to live in this - in this world - in this technological world where information can be disseminated so quickly, we have to be serious and take firm, strong action against those who are putting American lives at risk. Because this will put people's lives at risk.

As technology advances, so too does terrorists' use of technology to communicate - both to inspire and recruit. The widespread use of technology propagates the persistent terrorist message to attack U.S. interests, whether in the homeland or abroad.