Navigating the Dynamic Homeland Threat Landscape

good morning everyone and welcome to the Washington Institute for near East policy I'm Matt Levitt I direct the Reinhardt program in counterterrorism and intelligence and am the frommer Wexler fellow here and I'm thrilled to have with me if I could admit it a longtime friend Nick Rasmussen who is the coordinator for counterterrorism at the U.S Department of Homeland Security where he's responsible for overseeing intelligence operational planning policy matters across the Department's agencies uh Nick is a long long time National Security professional with over 20 something 27 28 years of experience uh but uh the National Security Council the national all kind of terrorism Center the U.S intelligence Community you've kind of been there and done that and so I'm glad now that you are here and are doing this um Nick is going to open with some opening remarks then he and I will have a little bit of a fireside chat and then we'll open up to q a from our participants some of you are participating on a zoom link and will be able to submit questions through the Q a function in the bottom middle of your screen the rest of you who are watching via the live stream on YouTube are also welcome to submit questions and you can do that by sending an email to policyforum at washingtoninstitute.org that's policy Forum one word at Washington Institute one word dot o-r-g so with no further Ado Nick tell us about navigating the dynamic Homeland threat landscape great uh first Matt thank you for having me join you at The Institute today The Institute is has long been a place where I and other people who fall into the practitioner category have looked to uh for Cutting Edge research analysis and insight from colleagues and experts such as yourself so thank you for doing this and thank you for continuing to do what you do here at the Institute what I thought I would do is say a few broad things or a few things about three broad topics as a way to enter into a conversation um and happy to follow up on on any particular aspects of these three broad things one I thought I would start as the title of the of the discussion today indicates with a with a bit of some observations about the threat landscape um and that's it's a bit of a um uh a thing for counterterrorism professionals to say the threat landscape is ever evolving ever more difficult ever more whatever but it's usually true and I'll try to explain a little bit why that is so and why we feel that that is such a dynamic um shifting threat landscape um stepping back after that I thought I would say a few things about where the issue and challenge of counterterrorism sits or resides within our broader National Security landscape right now because I think it's um it's stating the obvious to say that we're not where we were five or ten years ago with respect to the level of effort the the the place that CT sits counterterrorism sits in terms of our national set of priorities and then maybe thirdly and lastly I'll talk a little bit about the challenges of prevention work and what we're trying to do at the Department of Homeland Security to evolve our approach to prevention prevention of targeted violence prevention um work aimed at getting to individuals before they travel too far down a path towards extremism and ultimately violence um I'll say a few words about our evolving approach in that space so those three broad topics I figured was where I would start and as I said looking forward to diving into any uh of the details Brett landscape again as I kind of previewed a second ago um the adjectives I tend to draw on when when talking about our threat landscape and now I tend to think of it more from a particularly Homeland lens because of my current set of responsibilities um I think of our threat landscape as being more diverse Dynamic and more complicated at any point than at any point in our recent history um and that's because of the kind of unique um emergence of the domestic terrorism set of threats which we talk about a little bit more in a minute um but first I'll start overseas because that's a more familiar counter-terrorism environment in the way we thought about the Post 9 11 period it's of course true that we've had a fair degree of success in the 20 plus years since 9 11 at achieving what I would call suppressive effect we have successfully in many instances suppressed the ability of ftos foreign terrorist organizations and specifically the ftos who are our principal adversaries Isis Al-Qaeda to be specific um suppressed their capacity to carry out the most devastating sorts of attacks that they would aspire to carry out including those aimed at the Homeland that suppressive effect of course has been achieved through the massive application of resource primarily in the overseas environment the work done abroad by our community of military intelligence law enforcement diplomatic and other professionals who have targeted and worked hard to suppress the capacity of those groups to carry out attacks against us that has not come without costs we can talk about that at another Point um that's good news and I would not ever shy away from calling it good news what is less good news on the overseas threat landscape front is the fact that the threat remains a persistent and enduring one um I think in if you were kind of to look at gross assessments or gross evaluations of the global number of individuals who subscribe to the jihadist ideology were probably not on a downward Trend we are not in a place where that pool of individuals who are drawn to the ideology put forth by our most significant terrorist adversaries um that group has not grown smaller or shrunken um what has we have limited their capacity to carry out um what we would call external operations directed at the United States Homeland but we have not successfully Shrunk the pool globally and I think most of the academic work would back up back up that assertion um I also worry that the suppressive effect that I've just spoken about um only remains so if effort remains at a significant level so if if you let off on some of the efforts and some of the work you were engaged in to achieve that suppressive effect there is of course always concern about Resurgence of terrorist capability particularly with groups that have enduring intent to carry out attacks against the United States here at home um obviously I don't need to tell most uh individuals watching this broadcast um that the domestic violent extremist problem is the the most significant of our Homeland threat challenges at present that domestic violent extremist threat has grown in size lethality diversity complexity in just the last few years and all you need to do is track the kind of testimony of individuals like our FBI director Chris Ray or our Director of National Intelligence of real Haynes others who are speaking on behalf of our law enforcement intelligence Community to know that that set of challenges has kind of leapt jumped to the top of our set of Homeland concerns um whether that is tied to individuals that we would describe in the intelligence Community as Remy racially and ethnically motivated violent extremists or whether it's tied to some other form of grievance or anti-establishment ideology the violence um the violent intent the grievance narrative the idea that um the agenda of such individuals can be Advanced by carrying out attacks here inside the United States obviously shapes up as our most significant Homeland challenge right now um we can talk at greater length you know in the Q a part about why that's a particularly difficult challenge in terms of the toolkit that we have available to us um but I would just say the diversity of this threat literally strikes me um every day just in the last two weeks I've been on the west coast um engaging with some of our partner communities on the west coast in the Los Angeles area and in the course of one afternoon uh my DHS colleagues and I met with the Muslim American Community represented in the Los Angeles area we met with the Jewish American Community represented in the Los Angeles area and we met with the Asian American Pacific Islander Community uh represented in the Greater Los Angeles area each of those communities for very good reason feels at risk targeted and vulnerable to the very kind of the exact kind of violence I've been talking about a minute ago and obviously some communities will have longer experience in dealing with that certainly the Jewish community and sorry the Muslim American Community has been dealing with um that threat for most of the post-9 11 period but it was striking to see for example our um contacts in the Asian American Pacific Islander Community um speak to us about how they were feeling marginalized and vulnerable um by this by this threat environment so that to me was a striking indicia of the threat environment we're facing right now and I think the other thing I would point to in terms of that threat environment domestically is um I don't think of it now as being attached to Major Urban or Suburban areas if you think back to most of the post-9 11 periods the plots we would have disrupted where our law enforcement would have disrupted tended to be in large American cities um where particular communities might be gathered who engaged in in the kind of extremist interchange that led to to plotting and terrorism-related activity now as you can see just by reading the news all 50 states rural suburban Urban there is no environment that you can point to across the United States where there isn't um we aren't at risk of some form of extremism of one or another narrative flavor so that feels different different than in past years so that's broadly speaking how I look at the threat environment um and actually before I pivot away from that limit I should have said one other thing when thinking about the set of overseas terrorist actors who may be interested in carrying out um terrorist activity against the United States we cannot leave out the activities tied to State sponsors of terrorism specifically Iran and again I'll refer you again to the words of our FBI director our Director of National Intelligence who go on the record every year in the February March period and speak declaratively about how we think about the threat but I would just point to you to some obvious um indicators that there that there is activity in this regard if you think back to last August our department of justice unsealed an indictment against an irgc linked individual who's engaged in plotting activity aimed at um targeting our former National Security adviser John Bolton and that's all laid out now in court documents it is a kind of sequence of events that the that the individual was involved with as he sought to build a capability to carry out an attack against Mr Bolton um I won't go into the classified World in this setting obviously but when you see something like that in the unclassified world I think you're you're on safe ground to assume um that below the there is more to the iceberg below the surface uh of the of the water line and so I think that's worth um keeping in mind as we deal with um the global set of issues around Iranian proliferation activity and our our tense relationship with with Iran so stepping back from that threat landscape where does counter-terrorism fit into the broader National Security landscape at this particular moment um again somewhat speaking the obvious the there's we are in the midst of a shift I would argue towards a place where terrorism sits alongside other significant highly significant National Security issues at the top of our priority list it no longer sits there as the preeminent issue or the the most urgent issue it now sits there alongside others and those other issues to include um those tied to great power competition concerns we have over climate change our efforts to deal with cyber risk um just you could go on and on there's just a whole set of National Security issues that go well beyond um the counterterrorism space and so now if you're thinking and talking about counterterrorism you're doing so in an environment where you may not have first claim on resource you may not have the ability to um resource your way out of particular problems and it's requiring our counterterrorism um Enterprise and Community to make make harder choices about where resources can be devoted um we also find ourselves in a place where we are less reliant on a strategy where we will be using aggressive direct action in the overseas environment to deal with counterterrorism threats that's an obvious outgrowth of our um winding down of overseas presence in for in theaters like Afghanistan uh at the Middle East and even in Africa as well so that puts us in a place where we are adopting what I would describe more as a risk management model rather than an aggressive direct action model for engaging infrared mitigation risk management and mitigation um is of course more complicated exercise it requires you to make choices it requires puts a tremendous amount of pressure on our intelligence Community to be looking over the horizon to be identifying the particular indicators and warning signs that they would expect to see if a a threat that has been suppressed is at risk of re-emerging again we are relying even more than ever on our intelligence Community um to be anticipatory and even predictive in that space the other thing such a strategy does is put more pressure on to be honest my department the Department of Homeland Security because the Department of Homeland Security ends up being the um in a sense last line of defense in terms of actors trying to enter the country who may wish us harm so it's a little bit weedy and in you know in the in the weeds but if you had director abizade here uh in this setting I know she would be be talking to you about maintaining the health of the watch listing Enterprise trying to make sure that as we do less to mitigate threat overseas it's even more important that we have a robust watch listing Enterprise that gathers identity Intelligence on individuals tied to terrorism overseas so that we can prevent their travel to the United States so it's that kind of um more defensive oriented counterterrorism work that has not lessened in importance in this new landscape that's I would argue even more important um and it leaves us in a position I would argue um puts us in a place where we have less margin for error than we perhaps might have at earlier phases we're managing uh in summary a complicated threat environment in a landscape that is um that leaves us with fewer tools less margin for error and I think any counter-terrorism professional that you've ever worked with Matt including yourself thinks that this as a zero fail business um and so when we find ourselves in that environment where we put even more pressure on the people who are focused on these issues so um maybe I'll just wrap up with a few words on prevention because like prevention work is perhaps one of the most important Tools in our toolkit particularly when dealing with the set of domestic violent extremism threats that I spoke about a minute ago I wouldn't just I wouldn't say that we are embarked on some brand new strategy with prevention work or that we are on the verge of rolling out some brand new approach what I would say is that we are in the midst of of an evolution in thinking and an approach to prevention work um and that evolution is informed by 20 plus years of experience some of that experience hard one um some of that experience um including negative feedback from communities with whom we've engaged across we the government I'm not speaking me personally or I'm speaking we the government as an Enterprise over the last 20 years we've learned a lot about how communities respond and react when the government speaks to them about matters tied to extremism and terrorism and so I think that the emerging thinking out of our department the Department of Homeland Security is that we we want to position ourselves where we're talking about prevention work as a Public Health informed kind of activity um the the knowledge and perspective that our Public Health Community has gained over the past 30 40 50 years in dealing with other significant challenges um that have a security Dimension whether that's um gang violence um suicide prevention other harms where there is a community element or Community role to be played in identifying individuals who may be at risk and then seeking to direct resources to help them I think there's a lot to be learned in our work in talking about how to engage with individuals who are at risk of being um radicalized to extremism there's a lot to be learned from that public health informed approach that will give us I think a stronger basis on which to engage communities because what we have learned over the last 20 years with our prevention work is that we do not find great success when communities perceive that we are securitizing conversations with them about extremism if they view the government's engagement as a law enforcement Leading Edge into a conversation um that conversation is not as comfortable and does not go as well tells the community we're worried about you we think you are the problem when what we actually want to say is the opposite we want to help you as a community strengthen your protective factors so you can prevent um this phenomenon from from taking root in your community and to do that I think you have to change the way you talk about it I think we're in the midst of doing exactly that the last thing I'll say on the prevention side of things is that the hardest part of this work from my perspective is scalability the United States is a vast diverse place it is not the doing prevention work will not look the same and feel the same in Northern California as it will you know feel in South Florida or in New York or in Chicago or in Boston or in Houston or not to mention the rural areas around the country where I've mentioned that extremist influences may take hold how do we harness the capacity and and resources of the federal government in a way that enables communities themselves to be the Leading Edge of prevention work that's our challenge because I don't think we're ever going to be in a position where the Department of Homeland Security delivers programming that touches every community in a direct way and actually helps them manage individual cases of concern that's a challenge that I don't think we can ever meet but what we can do is shape the environment with Cutting Edge research identification of best practice fostering a community of practitioners across the country who do this work to understand this work I know you've contributed with your own work to that community of practitioners with the CBE Roundtable that you ran for uh have run for many years it is a small community and we needed to do big things on a big scale and so I think that is the biggest challenges I see it from the Department of Homeland Security is how do we scale up this work to meet the challenge um that we that we have in front of us I guess the last last thing I'd say before we stop Matt is I was in um a major American city last week with one of my DHS senior colleagues Ken Weinstein our under secretary for intelligence and we happened to have a conversation with the FBI special agent in charge for that community of course we talked about everything I've just talked about now the overseas terrorism threat the crime problem um the domestic violent extremism challenge that this uh SAC special agent in charge and his team were having to manage and I thought it was interesting that one of the things we kind of landed upon or alighted upon was that we in the counter-terrorism world unfortunately never successfully or rarely successfully crossed things off of our list the new problems that I've been talking about in many ways this morning are all additive um back there the individual I was talking to the FBI special agent in charge we we chuckled that there was actually still an active case underway that I had been familiar with eight ten years ago tied to a major South Asian extremist organization and that still sucks up time energy and resource for the Federal Bureau of Investigation in this major American city all the while they are dealing with everything else that I've described that has emerged on the threat landscape so that is something that I think is worth appreciating when you think about managing the threat landscape um things rarely go away but new things often arise and so the challenge for our counterterrorism professionals is how to make that queen size blanket cover that king-size bed at least that's how I think about it metaphorically so why don't I stop there I think what you're trying to say is you don't get enough sleep and I'm here for you um thank you for for that uh opening statement that really covered the Waterfront um so we'll engage in a little bit of a you know fireside chat now and and I encourage people uh watching to submit questions if you're on the zoom you can use the Q a function in the bottom middle of your screen I see some of you already have and if you're participating via the live stream feel free to send an email to the email address policy Forum at washingtoninstitute.org so Nick we're about to hit the two-year anniversary of the publication launch of the domestic terrorism uh strategy um and that involves a lot of different agencies of course not just yours it's had a lot of things that have been public and and and people looking in from the outside can notice that there was a big white house conference obviously there was publication of a big strategy document there was the launch of an online uh platform uh providing resources to people um what else is there and specifically for DHS how what's dhs's role in implementing uh the the strategy um dhs's role in implementing the strategy focuses on the things that DHS has resources to do and has experience doing and that some of that is the prevention work I spoke to a minute ago and as I said that's a space where our work is evolving and trying to become more fit to purpose with the threat landscape that that I described I mentioned to you when we were getting ready for this conversation we've just brought on a new senior leader to head up our uh primary prevention organization CP3 which drives the work in the department on this topic I think that provides us a new opportunity or a fresh opportunity to um come at the problem of prevention with with um Clear Eyes fresh eyes and an aggressive vision for how to make prevention work effective across the country but beyond the prevention work DHS has a role to play in helping communities prepare themselves for for terrorist attacks are um Department supports with its Grant programs investments in um Safety and Security measures for places of worship for for Community facilities such as schools recreation centers Etc basically allowing communities to participate in their own security by giving them the tools that they need to I don't want to say Harden their defenses because that's a horrific and horrible way to think about living here in the United States but but it's a reality that if we can help individual communities with training and Grant programs that allow them to become better providers of their own security then we we reduce the impact we potentially reduce the potential impact that attacks or incidents will have and I would say that's probably where DHS brings the most um experience expertise and resources to the table doing that work and then I would argue we also have a critical role to play in the in the community engagement piece of this one which I described when I talked about my research visit to Los Angeles it's important that citizens across the country feel like their government understands where they are in this space and how they feel vulnerable and at risk and targeted and so our department spends quite a bit of time engaged in community outreach um with communities of All Sorts to try to understand what more we can do to meet the needs that they have and to help them feel more secure in pursuing their daily lives so as we come up on the two-year anniversary of the strategy I know the White House is certainly looking to kind of take stock of where we've where we've made major Headway and where more resources more application of effort needs to happen that's enough that's a process we're engaging with our White House colleagues right now um but from my perspective from dhf from the DH DHS perspective we just need to do more of what we're doing and reach more communities across the country so that it tees into my my next question which is you know when I was in government working counterterrorism which was mostly um Jihadi in nature there was complete consensus not only within government and agencies but with among the public about the nature of the threat agreement that this was a threat and that something had to be done about it now we're in a situation where just about everybody in Academia and government acknowledges that the most prominent threats we're facing while the others have not gone away as you've explained come from a domestic violent extremist milieu but there doesn't seem to be the same public consensus uh on this and I wonder how that both affects what DHS is trying to do and what DHS is doing to try and help shape that circumstance first of all I would I would agree with your characterization we don't have the same Clarity of of perspective around the domestic violence extremist threat that we would have had or we do have and have had um tied to it the threat posed by overseas uh terrorist adversaries from our perspective or from my perspective at DHS be the the fix to that is to not pers not to try to persuade everybody to see things the way you see them but instead to try to demonstrate in word indeed that we are approaching this problem in a way as threat or ideology agnostic we are not interested in whether we're interested because we don't want to we want to understand what happened in a particular case or why did an individual Traverse down a path and end up in a certain place but in the end if the individual is motivated by a white supremacist ideology a islamist jihadist ideology an in-cell field ideology or some complex mixture of multiple ideologies regardless of which of those it is we the toolkit we would be using to to try to address that problem is probably pretty similar and so we don't have to necessarily agree on what are the proportionate sizes of the pie where the problem resides you don't have to reach full consensus as a society in terms of how we understand the problem from my perspective in order to reach consensus about what we need to do about it and as I said the what we need to do about it centers on in my judgment prevention work enabling communities to be the ones closest to the problem who have the ability and the tools to identify actors who are at risk apply preventive factors that might reduce that risk or mitigate that risk and thereby avert ultimate um you know Pathways to radicalization as you know from your own cve related work that's in exact science um but I think one of if there's a glimmer of hope here and this is a conversation I have had with our new CP3 director Bill braniff recently it's it's that we can approach this in a threat agnostic way because the way they want the way we want to do prevention work is not contingent on which form of extremist ideology an individual may have been animated by he had the only complicating Factor here is if we're trying to get communities to get involved in addressing forms of extremism that can lead to violence and there's not agreement within some of those communities that this is extremism fair enough or that it's uh unacceptable form of violence fair enough um that's a problem and and and to be fair for example many of the I can think of several DHS funded programs within the DHS grant program that are are aimed to address just this type of a thing well you often hear FBI director Ray say I he and his FBI colleagues don't focus on the ideology they focus on the violence that I don't know that I can look at it quite that starkly because if you're trying to work Upstream in the prevention space you obviously don't want to wait until violence occurs in order to engage in appropriate responses but I think the FBI director is on to something in that we what should be our cueing mechanism is that is the idea that violence May May emerge from this ideological path regardless of which ideological path it is and maybe that's what a community can can Galvanize around no Community even if they Define ideology they Define right wing left wing bar right far left differently no Community wants to see violence inflicted on itself or on their neighbors so maybe I'm choosing optimism here I think we have to um how does DHS think about you know follow up on something you just said how does DHS think about kind of the early edge of the spectrum of radicalization so we're pre-crime this is not yet a place for law enforcement to be you know using its tools but there is so much academic research right now on looking at misogyny looking at hate looking at for example these are just facts the largest number of hate crimes in this country right now are targeting Jews the amount of islamophobia is such that there was just an IPC on the matter within the government uh you have churches and synagogues and mosques you have the Asian American Pacific Islander Community I mean how do we go about even just having conversations with people about this pre-crime space so that we can try and get ahead of the curve and maybe begin to deal with this phenomenon that otherwise new problems come up but the old ones don't go away I think I'm at risk of Leaping beyond my my actual subject matter expertise when I get too deep into prevention um research but I think it is widely viewed as consensus that attitudes shaped in children particularly in the pre-teen years end up being pretty determinative when it comes to Pathways to extremism Pathways to extremist fueled violence so that gets exactly the point you're making with the question Matt which is how do we reach how do we contribute to the the building of an of an infrastructure that that invests in protective factors that I don't want to say inoculates young people against that kind of extremism but at least and again this is the term that that our prevention colleagues use again and again instead of looking at this through a risk factor lens let's look at this through a through a preventive factors lens how can we strengthen the elements of community in a place in a community such that individuals who engage in exactly the kind of of thinking or talk that you just described are viewed as outliers and then in need of engagement or a lack of a better word treatment um rather than that those attitudes being Landing in an environment where they are encouraged nurtured and fostered by the adults around them what I just described is a really really ambitious project and and again there's even a question to be asked do you want your federal government to be driving that kind of programming at state and local levels I I suspect not um again because of the questions of size and scale that I mentioned about earlier where DHS can contribute in this space is with its Grant programs that try to identify bespoke programming programs and organizations that can deliver this kind of outcome that I just described by a contribution to the preventive safety factors in a particular community and when that works let's identify that do more of it and scale it but what I just described and I guess some of my Prevention colleagues say to me quite often um what I just described is a multi-decade journey and again the public health informed approach or model that I described very briefly earlier it took the Public Health Community decades to reach the point at which we've got that kind of infrastructure in place across the country to support Public Health so the Allen Texas shooter um was if I counted it right at the time the 22nd mass shooting this year and we've had more since then so um does America have a gun problem is this part of the the larger problem set that you find yourself having to deal with I've always thought about the gun issue and the extremism terrorism issue in a pretty simple and linear way and maybe that's because I'm simple and linear um we to me it is a truism to say that when you have a problem with extremism and and violent extremism you don't want those those individuals who are holders of extremists or violent extremists thought to have access to to resources to include weapons that would allow them to um be even more lethal than they would otherwise be so the fact that an individual like the Allen Texas individual or any of the individuals um the Buffalo attacker we just passed the one-year anniversary of the horrific attack in Buffalo the target of the African-American Community um to me it is not controversial it is not Up For Debate to say that if they're if they have if the individual is engaged in those kinds of attacks um were not armed with high-powered Weaponry doesn't mean we would not have an extremism problem those perpetrators may very well have carried out attacks against individuals but those attacks might have been less lethal and we might have more ability to prevent the kind of mass casualty tragedies we've been witnessed to for far too often I'm going to ask just two more questions and we'll go straight to the questions from our q a um we we uh we have the sentencing of uh cyphilocypov for the 2017 uh New York City vehicular attack in an Isis inspired loan offender plot a an hve plot you said earlier that you know things don't go away we just have new things but you know I have people ask me all the time do we really have that type of thing still like we don't hear about that as much all the time is it because there aren't as many as is because DHS and FBI and everybody else are so effective of what they do but is that still something that is but constant yes it is and again I would not underplay the degree of success and hard work driven Effectiveness that our our law enforcement Community has had in suppressing that kind of threat but but again if you measure by kind of gross metrics like caseload um or other ways in which the bureau kind of quantifies its work I suspect that you would find and I think it's been borne out in testimony that the volume of work in this space with the space you just described has not significantly decreased and then just purely anecdotally I joined DHS in the early part of November um last year at the end of last year within the first week or two of my arrival I was part of the white nsc-led white house-led interagency meeting to deal with the very the very question of how to manage a set of threat concerns tied to um a affiliate of the Islamic State I guess is what I would say and so it felt both very new and very familiar at the same time as I was re-entering government I had kind of a moment of ah I guess this hasn't gone away yeah um now the suppressive effect that I've described earlier is real and we've had I don't want to underplay the success that we've had but because the The Narrative that underpins the ideological narrative that underpins so much about it plot activity um continues to hold appeal for a significant number of individuals including our fellow citizens or fellow residents in the United States so long as that is true we have a problem and the last question before I go to the questions from our audience to date the U.S has formally repatriated uh 39 individuals from Northeast Syria some individuals probably return prior to the formal repatriation process how does DHS look at the potential security concerns stemming from the foreign terrorist fighter repatriation and returnee phenomenon I think we look at it through the lens that I described our kind of overall counterterrorism Enterprises as adopting earlier in this conversation that is risk management and risk mitigation um you take the information that you have available to you you make judgments about whether repatriation of an individual would pose a particularly heightened risk and then if or a particular form of risk and if it does then you apply the appropriate measures whether they're law enforcement or other to um to try to manage or mitigate that risk as you are well aware the United States has been vocal in working with our partners across the globe to encourage them to engage in Greater levels of repatriation um not because anybody is excited or thrilled by the prospect of trying to reintegrate into their societies individuals who may pose some degree of risk not for that reason but for the reason that the status quo as it exists in Northern Syria right now leaves all of us less secure over the over the coming decades and so if if we have to marginally accept some degree of risk with repatriation um in service of an objective to shrink um the size of that pool residing in camps in Northern Syria then then I think we have to think hard about how to do that well and that's the message we've certainly tried to carry to so many of our partners around the globe excellent for those interested in this issue set watch this space in a couple weeks we're gonna have an event with my colleague Dr Devar margolin some others to talk about this and you'll get all the answers you need so I'd like to go to uh the Q a now again uh feel free to send questions to the Q a function on the zoom or to policy Forum at washingtoninstitute.org first question comes from Mike Downing um who or what entity is responsible to drive the National Intelligence collection Enterprise and as DHS an equal in this effort our fusion centers still relevant and have they succeeded in coordinating collection efforts of local state and Tribal Law Enforcement good questions all um I assume that's Chief Downing and like my good friend in California um obviously the the overall intelligence Enterprise for the federal government is driven by the Director of National Intelligence um but uh but I would say DHS through its intelligence organization um Ina Intelligence and Analysis under under secretary Ken Weinstein feels a particular responsibility to address the intelligence needs of our state and local Partners across the country um again I was just in Southern California a few weeks ago and I had a chance to spend time with Fusion Center colleagues in Orange County California what I learned there was something that I'm I'm heartened by and that is the federal government has as much to gain as it does to give in that environment I came away from that conversation in Orange County understanding a tremendous amount more about the extremism challenges particularly the anti-Semitism related threat challenges that were existing in Orange County that I knew beforehand so while it was important that the federal Enterprise support state and local partners with with our intelligence analysis it was equally important that we harness and harvest what our partners at the local level are learning and if that were true in the era when our primary threat was tied to the jihadist set of ideologies it's even a hundred and times more true in this environment because I believe we the federal government have way less to offer in terms of classified clandestinely acquired hard Intel on our dbe set of threats than we ever had to offer that we had to offer on our set of threats tied to overseas actors so in many cases the best and most useful information on our domestic violent extremist threats will come from sources outside the federal government whether it's for the research Community identifying individuals who are you know propagating material that proves inspiring to others whether it's um state and local law enforcement who are encountering encountering individuals of concern and reporting that um I feel like it's a much more two-way conversation with threat than it might have been 10 years ago yeah and and I understand there are specifically in the two years since the strategy came out there are things that that DHS is doing uh to really try and improve this uh conversation things like the creation of a mobile app and uh a very very sharp rise in the number of classified reporting at a variety of levels of classification but especially go to state local and tribal Partners to push out that which the federal level does have right to our local partners and again this is the always the the challenge in this space is putting the highly classified information in a form that can be disseminated as widely as possible and therefore be as as much use as possible as in some cases not all that useful to have a highly classified product shared with a law enforcement organization that may only have one or two cleared individuals who have to go down the hall to a special room to read and then really can't do anything with that information so the mobile app that you described that our our DHS intelligence colleagues are working to to push out will aim to make available all the way down to the street cop level um the kind of information that you're talking about Matt at an unclassified level and again constantly looking for feedback from our state local Partners to see if we're hitting the Mark um in this space because I think after 20 years we know that there's never there's never a good enough when it comes to the sharing of intelligence with Partners across it's just how do we get better uh the next question asks uh can you speak to the relationship between big Tech and the rapidly growing threat levels from domestic extremists what might the department be doing about regulating or monitoring or working together with big Tech to uncover threats opposed to our communities it's a very good question and it kind of attaches a little bit to the job I held just before coming back into government where I was working with an organization called gift CT the global internet form to counter-terrorism which which brings tech companies together for the purpose of addressing activity on their platforms by terrorists and violent extremists in a sense the easy part of this problem if there ever was an easy part of this problem and I don't know if I wouldn't argue that there was easy but the less complicated part of this problem attaches to the activity of individuals who are branded with ideology or imagery or or self-identification as fto linked so if Matt Levitt wishes to jump on his Facebook meta account or his Twitter account and say a bunch of good things about the Islamic State and wave his Black Banner I suspect Twitter will act with dispatch against Matt's account and remove that material and that may not have been so five years ago 10 years ago but I would argue now off and I'm not distinguing out Twitter or Facebook but the mainstream U.S companies um uh I've done a a good job of investing in the resources necessary for them to identify material tied to designated ftos and to remove it it is a far more complicated project for them to moderate that content when it's not tied to an fto and when they have to make judgments around whether material or content crosses a line and that line will look differently to different people and to different companies um when I was at gift CT we were embarked on a journey to try to expand the circle of consensus about how to to think about um category categorization of of content tied to non-fto but but still quite noxious ideologies um there's still work plenty of work to be done in that space um now often the material that you'll that will show up online is violative of companies terms of service for reasons other than tied to being tied to terrorism if it encourages violence for example that should result with many companies in removal of that we're addressing of that content just on the face of it now we don't if that doesn't always happen it certainly doesn't happen with the speed that we all want it to but but my point is is that the companies have tools at their disposal including their terms of service that they can apply and it falls on them to to make use of those tools you asked about dhs's role in this along with my White House State Department and other government colleagues we we DHS engage with GIF CT directly to support the work of gift CT as it helps tech companies in this space but we also maintain our own independent dialogue with technology companies sharing our own concerns um as a department and part of a CT Community led by the White House and that happens routinely and regularly uh Tom Warwick asks the next question so I warn you this is from a former DHS person it's coming kind of an inside question uh keying off Nick's comment about scaling out prevention programs do you have an end goal as to the size of the Community Resources required DHS is spending overall around 360 million dollars on community programs of all kinds but communities still find it hard to find resources to run programs can measure it with the threat how do how big do community programs need to go before they are effective in communities that range from Buffalo to valde this is a a familiar question from Tom I know it well and he's he's put his finger on something I think that I would agree with wholeheartedly we are not scaled to the point we need to be scaled at to deal with the threat picture that that I've articulated today um but within the context of the of the current budget that we have and the budget process that we have underway I think all I would be comfortable saying is that we need to get bigger and over over time by orders of magnitude um that is of course not something that the department can do on its own it has to do so as part of a kind of a unified um Administration approach to to the president's budget and then to seek the congress's approval as well and and what will support our efforts over time is if we get positive feedback from communities and if we can tie our work as I know our prevention colleagues are determined to do we can tie our work to evidence-based research that says this is effective this is not effective this is likely to be more effective the more we can show that we are engaged in an evidence-driven effort the more we can legitimately make a claim for for that kind of order of magnitude increase in resources yeah metrics and evaluation is the only way to get this going but in the meantime I recommend not having trying to have this conversation until at least after June 1. um do you feel hampered in your meaning the government's efforts by the slow and relatively ineffective judicial process and pursuing domestic extremists interesting question I hadn't really thought about it until just a second um whereas Tom's question I've thought about a lot because he's raised it with me in a number of settings and it's a good one I don't know that I would would that I would say we feel hampered um because I would argue in my mind in some cases even one of the things you gain when you have a successful prosecution effort of someone engaged in what we might call domestic terrorism because you not only deliver consequences to a perpetrator and that's an ideally deliver some form of Justice to the affected community but hopefully you're also creating a bit of a deterrent effect you are demonstrating to other individuals who may be inclined to engage in that kind of violent activity and saying nope you can be put away for a long time for doing that kind of activity and I don't know that you need to have work your way all the way through the process in order for some of that to turn effect to be um realized and so just the fact that individuals now are being indicted prosecuted and ultimately imprisoned for offenses that are characterized as domestic terrorism I hope will prove prove to be a powerful deterrent do you think there's utility in uh pursuing as a matter of policy uh hate crime charges uh to be able to get at some of the activity that's earlier in the kind of radicalization to violence uh Continuum we we we do have laws on the books for this a lot of what we're talking about not all of it but a lot of it would constitute hate crimes with their utility in having or having more kind of hate crimes task forces to try and address some of these things earlier in the process again I'm I'm channeling and even going to quote my my new colleague Bill branith who talks about hate crimes all the time we talk about dozens of terrorism-related incidents a year inside the United States and how unacceptable that is if you broaden your aperture more widely to include hate crimes including real crimes that involve police reports and arrests and prosecutions but then go beyond that to include aggressions microaggressions and unreported crimes you're probably talking about not only thousands but tens of thousands of incidents or crimes a year and so by Framing my answer that way I would say of course Matt anything we can conceive of that might help us manage the hate phenomena at a lower level of violence before it has progressed to its worst manifestations a mass casualty event at a mall um that would be a better outcome um but again this is again another place where our patchwork of jurisdictional and um basically federalism Federalism is a challenge in this space I think and that we find ourselves with data challenges I know the FBI has spoken to the data challenges they have in gathering hate crime data I don't think any of us are satisfied that we have um the picture of hate crime that we need to in order to develop more effective policy responses so far we've talked about um kind of foreign terrorist organization threats and domestic violent extremist threats and two distinct baskets but in in what ways do you ever find them kind of overlapping I remember for example after the um uh Isis K attack as we were withdrawing from Afghanistan and withdrawal overall you saw all kinds of domestic white supremacist anti-government extremists um lauding the Taliban and at a certain level there there is some kinship just in terms of you know sticking it to the big man are they entirely still separate baskets or at any level in the analysis is there a bleeding between these groups of ideologies I think there's certainly a extremist narratives may have some kind of magnetic attraction that tend to attract and so I think to the point you just made you find these seemingly strange instances in which someone can have aspects of a jihadist ideology at the same time as they are expressing other forms of ideology that make them appear to have a far right or a white supremacist ideology I'm not probably the best placed person to unpack the the psychology behind that I think from my perspective though what where we try where we draw distinctions in terms of how we respond to the problem is when are we talking about individuals who are acting largely on their own or in small um self-selected groups of like-minded individuals and when are we confronting as we did for most of the post-9 11 period a true Global Network with hierarchy structure bureaucracy and all of the associated capability behind that to me that's the bigger distinction rather than the ideology which kind of terrorism problem are you are you confronting the atomized terrorism Problem whatever the ideology of the individual who is largely on his own or at worst or most connecting to a small number of like-minded individuals maybe even never in person or are you instead dealing with the post-911 Al Qaeda challenge that we had where we were worried about external operations driven by a centralized planning process highly bureaucratized structured resourced from a center um that was a long time ago that we've seen lots of I'm covering a lot of history in a in a quick sweep but that I think of that distinction as being more important than the ideological distinction so that begs my final question which is um how transnational really is the white supremacist anti-government various ideologies that ultimately coalesce into what we describe as the domestic violent extremism is it just shared ideology or is there something more tangible to maybe use the foreign terrorist organization tool against them or short of that other tools that enable us to leverage are more traditional transnational toolkit I think that's a evolving moving Target questions I don't know that the answer today will be the same as it might be six months or a year from now but what I canceled we'll bring you back what I can say with confidence is that this is a problem we're dealing with but it's also a problem that dozens of our partner country friends around the United around the world are dealing within some form or fashion too so it is transnational in that respect people are you will find people in northern and western Europe and the Far East in Asia Australia New Zealand all of whom are are kind of who fit into the same category there certainly have been ideological and Communications links between individuals and Country a and Country b um I don't know that I can point to the kind of plotting that we again traditionally saw for so much of the Post 9 11 period but there's a transnational aspect to this and it behooves us to keep carefully monitoring and digging to make sure that we're not missing something and if nothing else there's an opportunity for shared learning as our other partner countries deal with their form their particular variant of this threat as well um just this week at DHS we are hosting meetings with two of our European partners and this figures on the on the on the agenda in ways it would not have figured five or ten years ago um Nick thank you so much for joining us today and taking the time I want to thank your colleagues for making it possible thank you all for participating with us and submitting your questions uh be safe be healthy enjoy the rest of your day Nick thank you very much

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Length: 62min 15sec (3735 seconds)

Published: Wed May 17 2023