In Search for F.B.I. Director, Administration Seeks a Shared Philosophy

Robert S. Mueller III, who became the F.B.I. director just a week before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, will complete his 10-year term on Sept. 4, having led the in-progress effort to transform the bureau into a domestic intelligence agency.

A small team led by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has been evaluating potential successors and, according to officials familiar with the deliberations, has reached certain views about the ideal candidate.

In particular, officials said, the administration wants someone who shares the philosophy and has the management abilities to press forward with changing the bureau’s culture, so that agents focus less on solving already-completed crimes and more on uncovering potential threats — even at the expense of accumulating arrests and convictions.

Possible contenders include James B. Comey, a former deputy attorney general; Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the United States attorney in Chicago; Raymond W. Kelly, the New York City police commissioner; Ronald K. Noble, a former enforcement head at the Treasury Department who now leads Interpol; and Kenneth L. Wainstein, a former assistant attorney general for national security.

Officials say the administration is also looking for someone who will be easily confirmed and who will be respected both inside the bureau and elsewhere in the intelligence community.

Finally, they say, they want someone with the character to be a strong leader during a crisis and to maintain an appropriate level of independence, but who would keep a low political profile and focus on operational matters while deferring to the White House and the Justice Department on policy issues.

In many ways the administration appears to be looking for a clone of Mr. Mueller, who worked relatively smoothly with four attorneys general of widely divergent personalities and political views, under both a Republican and a Democratic president.

“Bob is a hard person to replace,” Mr. Holder told reporters last week. “He has done a really excellent job in transforming the F.B.I. He is a person who has the confidence of the people in the F.B.I. and people in the intelligence community. He’s a person I’ve worked with for a number of years — he’s a friend. He has the president’s confidence as well. So we want to make sure the person picked to be his successor will be able to fill those really large shoes that he leaves.”

Mr. Holder said the administration wanted to have the next director in place by the time Mr. Mueller is required to step down. He hinted that a nomination could come as early as May, though other officials said that later was more likely. The Senate has been slow to vote on Justice Department nominees lately; by contrast, in 2001, the Senate confirmed Mr. Mueller less than a month after his nomination.

It is not clear whether there is a front-runner for the job.

Most of the high-profile potential nominees come with advantages and disadvantages.

Mr. Comey, a career prosecutor who was the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York before his elevation to deputy attorney general, earned a reputation for independence by leading — with Mr. Mueller at his side — an internal Bush administration revolt in March 2004 over the legality of the program of surveillance without warrants, forcing the White House to modify the program.

Mr. Comey is now identified as a Republican political appointee, which could make it easier for him to win confirmation, but the Obama administration might also be reluctant to signal that it could not find a Democrat for the job. Mr. Comey also now has a well-paying job at Lockheed Martin and may be reluctant to leave it.

Mr. Fitzgerald, a longtime prosecutor and a holdover United States attorney from the Bush administration, also has a strong reputation for independence, as leader of the investigation into the leak of the name of a Central Intelligence Agency operative, Valerie Plame Wilson.

Like Mr. Comey, Mr. Fitzgerald now has the public identity of a Republican political appointee. Moreover, his demonstrated willingness to challenge the Bush White House could give its current occupants pause, though they would never say so in public.

Mr. Kelly, by contrast, is a Democrat with a strong law enforcement résumé. Before becoming commissioner of the New York Police Department, he was a Treasury Department official during the Clinton administration and supervised the United States Customs Service, the Secret Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, has endorsed him for the F.B.I. position.

But Mr. Kelly would be 70 at the start of his 10-year term. In addition, his efforts to expand the Police Department’s counterterrorism intelligence-gathering capabilities have led to turf-war friction with F.B.I. officials. He also helped scuttle Mr. Holder’s signature plan to prosecute the Sept. 11 defendants in Manhattan.

Mr. Noble, too, is a Democrat who oversaw the Treasury Department’s enforcement arm for a period during the Clinton administration. He has global stature as the first American to be elected to lead Interpol, developing ties that would resonate with the F.B.I.’s increasing presence overseas. But he has less operational experience than other candidates and is somewhat less well-known in Washington.

Mr. Wainstein is the candidate most closely associated with Mr. Mueller, whom he worked with first as the F.B.I. general counsel and then as his chief of staff. Later, Mr. Wainstein became the United States attorney for the District of Columbia, then led the Justice Department’s national security division. Since leaving the department, he has frequently testified before Congress about national security legal policy issues. Like Mr. Comey and Mr. Fitzgerald, Mr. Wainstein is now identified as a Republican appointee — though he, too, was a longtime federal prosecutor and is generally respected on both sides of the aisle.

At least two prominent figures are said to have made it clear that they do not want to be considered for the job, including Merrick B. Garland, a federal appeals court judge, and Jamie Gorelick, a former deputy attorney general and a member of the Sept. 11 commission.

 

Criminal Past Makes a Job Search Even Harder

The eight months she spent in prison, she said, were “the best thing that ever happened to me,” persuading her to pursue training in medical administration and complete coursework for a degree in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. At 38, she is a far different person from the confused young woman who strayed into crime, she says.

But employers, initially impressed by her credentials, grow leery when they learn her history through criminal background checks. She has been turned down for more than a dozen jobs since finishing college in 2010.

The pool of Americans seeking jobs includes more people with criminal histories than ever before, a legacy in part of stiffer sentencing and increased enforcement for nonviolent crimes like drug offenses, criminal justice experts said. And each year, more than 700,000 people are released from state and federal prisons, a total that is expected to grow as states try to reduce the fiscal burden of their overcrowded penal institutions.

Almost 65 million Americans have some type of criminal record, either for an arrest or a conviction, according to a recent report by the National Employment Law Project, whose policy co-director, Maurice Emsellem, says that the figure is probably an underestimate.

Some, like Ms. Spikes, have left their criminal pasts far behind. Others have been convicted of minor offenses, or of crimes that appear to have little relevance to the jobs they are seeking.

Employers once had to physically search court records to uncover the background of people they were considering hiring. But the Internet and the proliferation of screening companies that perform background checks have made digging into a job applicant’s history both easy and inexpensive for prospective employers.

In a 2010 survey by the Society for Human Resources Management, almost 90 percent of the companies surveyed, most of them large employers, said they conducted criminal background checks on some or all job candidates.

Advocates for workers say that the indiscriminate use of background checks by companies has made finding employment extremely difficult for millions of Americans.

“We’re spending a tremendous amount of money incarcerating people and then creating a system where it’s almost impossible for them to find gainful employment,” said Adam T. Klein, an employment lawyer with Outten & Golden in New York, a firm that has represented plaintiffs in class-action lawsuits against employers over criminal checks.

Many companies, advocates say, screen out anyone who has a hint of criminal activity in his or her background, in violation of government guidelines that demand that employers take into account the severity of an offense, the length of time that has passed and its relevance to the job in question.

In some cases, they note, people have been turned away because of arrests that never resulted in convictions.

“I understand the employers’ response that, ‘We don’t want murderers working for us,’?” Mr. Klein said. “What if you just have minor events, like arrests for drug use in college, speeding tickets, D.W.I.’s?”

Employers argue that they already use common sense when they evaluate a candidate’s background and take steps to ensure that they are being fair.

“Advocacy groups are kind of saying that this is the day and age of the sign that says, ‘Convicts need not apply,’?” said Rod Fliegel, a lawyer at Littler Mendelson, an employment law firm. “But in my experience, that would be taking the exception and presenting it as the rule.”

Mr. Fliegel and other lawyers representing companies said that employers were caught in a bind; they can also be sued if they fail to screen an employee who later harms someone. Some type of jobs — in the securities industry, for example — require that candidates be free of convictions for certain crimes. And when applicants are abundant and jobs are scarce, some employers say that they should be able to pick and choose candidates who carry no legal baggage.

There is no federal law that prohibits discrimination against people with criminal records. But the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has set guidelines on how employers can use such records. Because African-Americans, Hispanics and other minorities have higher rates of criminal convictions, a blanket policy that screens out anyone with a criminal history will discriminate against these groups, the commission says, and is unlawful under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The E.E.O.C. has been a plaintiff in several lawsuits over background checks, and the guidelines have led to a raft of lawsuits against companies under Title VII — at least seven are working their way through the courts. One, brought by the commission against Peoplemark, an employment agency, was dismissed because the commission was not able provide expert evidence to back up the discrimination claim.

At least three lawsuits brought under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which mandates that employers notify applicants rejected because of a consumer reporting agency’s criminal background check, have been settled for the plaintiffs.

Defendants in lawsuits over criminal background checks have included transportation companies, a charter school, screening companies, a global consulting firm and the Census Bureau.

In New York, where state law regarding background checks is stricter than federal policies, the state attorney general’s office has settled with Radio Shack, ChoicePoint and other companies after investigating them for violations.

Mr. Fliegel and some other lawyers who represent employers argue that Title VII is not an appropriate tool for ensuring fairness for people with criminal records.

“If you’ve read Title VII, it doesn’t say anything about ex-criminals,” Mr. Fliegel said.

But advocates and lawyers for plaintiffs in the suits say that using of Title VII in regard to criminal background checks is well established. Still, many employers suspect that hiring a person with a criminal conviction is a gamble.

Until recently, the available statistics seemed to back up employers’ suspicions: A third of those released from prison returned within three years, recidivism studies showed, and it was assumed that ex-offenders would always be more likely to commit crimes than people with no criminal convictions.

But several new studies by criminologists are beginning to turn that assumption on its head, providing a far more encouraging picture of actual risks posed to employers by those whose crimes lie well in the past. Called “redemption research,” the studies find that the risk that an ex-offender will be re-arrested decreases substantially over time, eventually becoming indistinguishable from that of someone of the same age with no record.

For first-time offenders, this point of “redemption” is reached 7 to 10 years after a conviction. For older first offenders, it comes significantly earlier. For some crimes and for offenders with multiple prior convictions, redemption takes considerably longer.

The studies have been cited in some lawsuits over criminal background checks. Taken collectively, they indicate that “it is no longer accurate to say that individuals with criminal records are always a higher risk than individuals without a criminal record,” said Shawn Bushway, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University at Albany, one of several researchers who have conducted redemption studies.

Ms. Spikes, who is still searching for a job, said she hoped she would eventually find an employer who could overlook her background.

“I’ve been told that I’m the kind of person that can pick myself up, dust myself off and give it a go again,” she said. “What’s most important to me is that the story has somewhat of a happy ending.”

 

Google, a Giant in Mobile Search, Seeks New Ways to Make It Pay

But there was a problem: searching on a phone was less than ideal. It was hard to type on small screens. And most irritating for Google, which brags about its speed on every page of search results, was that Web pages were slow to load on phones.

So Google started a project it code-named Grand Prix. In six weeks, engineers revamped mobile searching and hatched plans for new ways to search on the go, by talking or taking photos instead of typing.

The stakes were high. Mobile phones could be a huge new market for Google. Or they could provide an opening for a competitor to pounce, or obviate the need for a search engine altogether. If people on phones could go straight to apps for information, why Google anything?

Today, Google says mobile searches are growing as quickly as Web searches were at the same stage in the company’s early days, and they are up sixfold in the last two years. Google has a market share of 97 percent for mobile searches, according to StatCounter, which tracks Web use.

Now that it dominates the field, Google is throwing its burly computing power and heaps of data at new problems specific to mobile phones — like translating phone calls on the fly and recognizing photos of things like plants and items of clothing.

“I feel like a parent the second time around feels,” said Amit Singhal, a Google fellow who works on search. “You saw your first child grow at an amazing pace, and here we are with our second child, mobile, growing at the same pace and showing the same signs.”

Google has been slow to seize some newer Web business opportunities, most notably social networking. Investors have criticized the company for dragging its feet when it comes to figuring out how to make money in new fields.

But mobile is an exception. Last year, Eric E. Schmidt, then the company’s chief executive, said Google’s philosophy was “mobile first,” meaning it would build products for phones at the same time as versions for PCs.

“This is the place that Google is essentially betting its future on,” said Karim Temsamani, Google’s head of mobile advertising, a role created in September.

Still, Google has not consistently followed the mobile-first mantra, and some analysts, including Colin W. Gillis of BGC Partners, say it has not moved quickly enough to create new mobile products or ads.

“They’ve done a really good job of positioning themselves so they can’t get boxed out of the market,” Mr. Gillis said. “Now they just need to deliver some innovation. Let’s wring some revenue out of this platform.”

Google said in October that mobile ads were on track to generate $1 billion in revenue in the coming year. Mobile users can call a business from within a Google ad or receive coupons for nearby stores. They can take cellphone photos of movie posters to pull up a trailer. With new technologies like near-field communication, advertisers could reward customers with loyalty gifts for walking into stores, Mr. Temsamani said.

But because mobile ads generally sell for less than half the price of Web ads, Mr. Gillis said, “there’s just not a lot of profit left over.” Though Google makes Android software for phones, it does not make money from it directly because it gives it away to phone makers. Meanwhile, Apple makes money from its devices and from what appears on their screens, including its own ad network.

Still, the company’s approach to the mobile market is classic Google: take problems that computer scientists have been working on for decades, throw huge amounts of data and computing power at them and assume that if the resulting product is useful to people, it will eventually make money.

People can now snap photos of landmarks or wine labels to search for them using Google Goggles, speak to their phones using voice search and, on Android phones, translate spoken conversations between English and Spanish.

“We as an academic community would have figured this out, but we wouldn’t have been able to set it up on this kind of scale,” said Alexei A. Efros, an associate professor in computer science and robotics at Carnegie Mellon, referring to these kinds of technological feats. “That’s really the great thing about Google, the fact that it can do it on such a humongous scale and actually make it useful to the general public.”

Google trained its computers to learn spoken language based on troves of voice recordings. “Even if you’re from Brooklyn and you drop all your R’s when you park your car, it’s heard plenty of people from Brooklyn and it can do well,” said Mike Cohen, head of Google’s speech technology team.

At first, Google engineers thought people would talk to its voice search service as if they were talking to a person — “you know, it’s my anniversary, and I’d love to take my wife somewhere really romantic to eat, do you have any ideas?” — so it taught the service to filter out unnecessary words. But it turned out that Google had already trained people into thinking in keywords, so they knew to search “romantic restaurants” even when speaking instead of typing.

Goggles, the visual search tool, recognizes things that have strong visual textures, like a bar code, book cover or landmark. But it often can’t distinguish between a black cat and a black chair, for instance, or recognize food or plants, though Google is working with botanists to teach its machines the secrets of leaf-spotting. Google already has the capability to recognize faces, so people could theoretically snap a photo of a blind date and pull up an online profile, but it is not yet using that technology because it is still working out the privacy implications.

People can also snap a photo to translate a menu in a foreign country, and speak English to hear the Spanish translation. Someday Google hopes to be able to translate both sides of a phone conversation as it happens, said Franz Och, head of Google’s machine translation group.

Though the search results Google spits out might seem the same on phones as on computers, there are some behind-the-scenes differences.

For example, certain search results are ranked differently, with location factored in. Search for Wal-Mart on a computer and Google suspects you are probably looking for the e-commerce site or job openings. Search on a phone and Google assumes you are looking for the nearest store. Other search tools were built specifically for phones. Search for weather or stock prices and Google shows a scale, movable with a finger, to see results for different times.

Google says mobile search is not stealing time from computer searches. Instead, mobile searches spike during the lunch hour and evenings, when people are away from their computers. And while mobile users do search for simple things like weather and train times, engineers have been surprised at how many people also ask more complicated questions about business and politics.

“Mobile search is definitely going to surpass desktop search,” said Scott B. Huffman, who works on mobile search at Google and leads its search evaluation team. “The lines will pass, and I think they’ll pass before anyone thought they would.”

 

Google, a Giant in Mobile Search, Seeks New Ways to Make It Pay

But there was a problem: searching on a phone was less than ideal. It was hard to type on small screens. And most irritating for Google, which brags about its speed on every page of search results, was that Web pages were slow to load on phones.

So Google started a project it code-named Grand Prix. In six weeks, engineers revamped mobile searching and hatched plans for new ways to search on the go, by talking or taking photos instead of typing.

The stakes were high. Mobile phones could be a huge new market for Google. Or they could provide an opening for a competitor to pounce, or obviate the need for a search engine altogether. If people on phones could go straight to apps for information, why Google anything?

Today, Google says mobile searches are growing as quickly as Web searches were at the same stage in the company’s early days, and they are up sixfold in the last two years. Google has a market share of 97 percent for mobile searches, according to StatCounter, which tracks Web use.

Now that it dominates the field, Google is throwing its burly computing power and heaps of data at new problems specific to mobile phones — like translating phone calls on the fly and recognizing photos of things like plants and items of clothing.

“I feel like a parent the second time around feels,” said Amit Singhal, a Google fellow who works on search. “You saw your first child grow at an amazing pace, and here we are with our second child, mobile, growing at the same pace and showing the same signs.”

Google has been slow to seize some newer Web business opportunities, most notably social networking. Investors have criticized the company for dragging its feet when it comes to figuring out how to make money in new fields.

But mobile is an exception. Last year, Eric E. Schmidt, then the company’s chief executive, said Google’s philosophy was “mobile first,” meaning it would build products for phones at the same time as versions for PCs.

“This is the place that Google is essentially betting its future on,” said Karim Temsamani, Google’s head of mobile advertising, a role created in September.

Still, Google has not consistently followed the mobile-first mantra, and some analysts, including Colin W. Gillis of BGC Partners, say it has not moved quickly enough to create new mobile products or ads.

“They’ve done a really good job of positioning themselves so they can’t get boxed out of the market,” Mr. Gillis said. “Now they just need to deliver some innovation. Let’s wring some revenue out of this platform.”

Google said in October that mobile ads were on track to generate $1 billion in revenue in the coming year. Mobile users can call a business from within a Google ad or receive coupons for nearby stores. They can take cellphone photos of movie posters to pull up a trailer. With new technologies like near-field communication, advertisers could reward customers with loyalty gifts for walking into stores, Mr. Temsamani said.

But because mobile ads generally sell for less than half the price of Web ads, Mr. Gillis said, “there’s just not a lot of profit left over.” Though Google makes Android software for phones, it does not make money from it directly because it gives it away to phone makers. Meanwhile, Apple makes money from its devices and from what appears on their screens, including its own ad network.

Still, the company’s approach to the mobile market is classic Google: take problems that computer scientists have been working on for decades, throw huge amounts of data and computing power at them and assume that if the resulting product is useful to people, it will eventually make money.

People can now snap photos of landmarks or wine labels to search for them using Google Goggles, speak to their phones using voice search and, on Android phones, translate spoken conversations between English and Spanish.

“We as an academic community would have figured this out, but we wouldn’t have been able to set it up on this kind of scale,” said Alexei A. Efros, an associate professor in computer science and robotics at Carnegie Mellon, referring to these kinds of technological feats. “That’s really the great thing about Google, the fact that it can do it on such a humongous scale and actually make it useful to the general public.”

Google trained its computers to learn spoken language based on troves of voice recordings. “Even if you’re from Brooklyn and you drop all your R’s when you park your car, it’s heard plenty of people from Brooklyn and it can do well,” said Mike Cohen, head of Google’s speech technology team.

At first, Google engineers thought people would talk to its voice search service as if they were talking to a person — “you know, it’s my anniversary, and I’d love to take my wife somewhere really romantic to eat, do you have any ideas?” — so it taught the service to filter out unnecessary words. But it turned out that Google had already trained people into thinking in keywords, so they knew to search “romantic restaurants” even when speaking instead of typing.

Goggles, the visual search tool, recognizes things that have strong visual textures, like a bar code, book cover or landmark. But it often can’t distinguish between a black cat and a black chair, for instance, or recognize food or plants, though Google is working with botanists to teach its machines the secrets of leaf-spotting. Google already has the capability to recognize faces, so people could theoretically snap a photo of a blind date and pull up an online profile, but it is not yet using that technology because it is still working out the privacy implications.

People can also snap a photo to translate a menu in a foreign country, and speak English to hear the Spanish translation. Someday Google hopes to be able to translate both sides of a phone conversation as it happens, said Franz Och, head of Google’s machine translation group.

Though the search results Google spits out might seem the same on phones as on computers, there are some behind-the-scenes differences.

For example, certain search results are ranked differently, with location factored in. Search for Wal-Mart on a computer and Google suspects you are probably looking for the e-commerce site or job openings. Search on a phone and Google assumes you are looking for the nearest store. Other search tools were built specifically for phones. Search for weather or stock prices and Google shows a scale, movable with a finger, to see results for different times.

Google says mobile search is not stealing time from computer searches. Instead, mobile searches spike during the lunch hour and evenings, when people are away from their computers. And while mobile users do search for simple things like weather and train times, engineers have been surprised at how many people also ask more complicated questions about business and politics.

“Mobile search is definitely going to surpass desktop search,” said Scott B. Huffman, who works on mobile search at Google and leads its search evaluation team. “The lines will pass, and I think they’ll pass before anyone thought they would.”