Agents and analysts and what other agencies were doing so they could Work Together with the people in those particular agencies. And it also involved creating new career paths, upward mobility, promotion opportunities and so on so we could retain the intelligence analysts along with the special agents. Another change that came about was to expand the role of the legal attache. Its a phrase that depicts the fbi people working overseas in our various embassies. They have a unique role. While the cia is viewed and in Foreign Countries as a spy agency, but the fbi had the ability to work with the local Law Enforcement. Either the National Law Enforcement people or local Law Enforcement people, particularly in the large cities overseas. In many ways, they are the tip of the spear in terms of our discovery potential terrorist plots and potential situations and information about terrorist organizations and the like. So they have a new very vital role in the counterterrorism effort. And part of this was stationing intelligence analysts with the legal attaches overseas. Another major recommendation was the importance of science and technology. And that is keeping pace, which has not been the case generally throughout the intelligence community, and particularly in the fbi with the science and technology in terms of Information Technology and other ways in which science can be used to improve the capabilities of intelligence analysis and also communication of information within the organization. A key thing, of course, was to gain the budgetary and logistics support. Its funny that sometimes the Little Things become very important. One of the things we found, it was important for the intelligence analysts to have a secure phone where they could then talk with their counterparts in other agencies. The dia or nasa or Homeland Security, or whoever else it might be because just of the information is classified. So the idea of having a secure phone readily available either here or in the legatt offices. One is information sharing. The key role of the fbi in organizing the joint Terrorism Task forces in which local Law Enforcement was brought into the whole effort against terrorism. Most information about potential terrorist activities in the United States is gained through the knowledge of local Law Enforcement about whats going on. While domain analysis, that is fbi analysts looking at the potential in their particular geographical area, the indigenous communities, people who have returned, foreign fighters that have returned, all these things that make up the potential for future terrorist activities, whats going on in the mosques and coffee houses, these things are probably best known to local Law Enforcement. Its then how to integrate that information with others the fbi and analysts and special agents are collecting so that we have a picture of whats going on in terms of potential terrorist activities. And the importance of the legal authorities. Weve had a great debate, as was discussed in the preceding activities here, but the importance of the patriot act and the importance of the nsas activity legally being able to intercept communications from overseas and with terrorist organizations, these kinds of things, these legal authorities are very important. At the same time, the importance of maintaining the Civil Liberties. We recommend our special director have a Advisory Panel available to him on a continuing basis to monitor the Civil Liberties aspects of what the bureau is doing. These are some of the things we found, that we recommended, as far as the future is concerned. I can say this. The United States is lucky to have an organization like the fbi that not only has a great history but the ability to accept change. It hasnt been easy over the decade since 9 11, there have been some tough moments to get the idea of intelligence integrated into along with Law Enforcement into the work of the fbi. Its been difficult to make the cultural changes, but theyve made remarkable progress up until now. The new director is totally behind the recommendtations that we have made. I think theres a Bright Future for the fbi, but its very important there be one because the future of the fbi will be the way in which this country is protected against terrorism. Okay. Im going to touch on three key areas or three trends that i think are significant with regard to the rise of radicalism and also have important implications. The first is the growing concern with regard to homegrown violent extremists. When we use that term, its useful to expand the typology in terms of, what are the different flavors of terrorism. Foreign terrorism is one of them. Those are foreign actors directed, supported by foreign terrorist groups operating in the United States or elsewhere. The second is domestic terrorists. And those are primarily based in the United States and not under the direction, influence or inspiration of International Terrorist groups but operating independently. And then this third flavor, the homegrown violent extremists, primarily based in the United States but inspired by foreign terrorist groups but not directed or directly supported by those groups. The reason why they are significant ill get into a little more. The second is the increasing emphasis on preventing violent extremism rather than countering radicalism. The terms radicalism or extremism are used interchangeably. Basically, you can be a radical or extremist and not be violent and not break the law, but we track that. So were focusing more, of late, on those who are actually about to or currently breaking the law versus those to the left. Ill talk a little about the implications for that. And third is the increasing availability of what some describe as technologies of mass empowerment. When you look at the ubiquitous and Rapid Development of highly sophisticated technology, what are the ramifications for what terrorist groups in that group of hve, homegrown violent extremists, what are they capable of today that they might not have dreamed about 10, 15 years ago. So let me start with growing concerns with regard to homegrown violent extremists. Of course, our concerns are reinforced by the events in chattanooga. Characterized by either lone wolves, individuals who are operating, either selfradicalized or radicalized in a way that only has them absorbing versus necessarily communicating with other entities. Or small groups that radicalize each other. A group of four or five. And, therefore, they do not have that signature that typically we in the Law Enforcement community are focusing in on. Are they communicating with known actors of concern . Traveling and consorting with individuals of concern, et cetera. Those are the tippers that allow us to focus from the massive potential of individuals of concern to those we believe present the greatest threat. The real challenge associated with the homegrown violent extremist is they are extremely difficult to detect or prevent. If theres a silver lining, particularly weve looked at these groups as having relatively low capability for high consequence events. Small arms, relatively small amounts of explosives. They can kill a large number of people in terms of 5, 10s, 20 but you arent looking at 9 11 size magnitude attacks or worse. Which takes me to the next area which is how do we differentiate the individuals that were going to be concerned about and focus limited Law Enforcement and intelligence assets on, versus the broader diaspora of much larger set of people who may be disenfranchised and may harbor enmity or other concerns for this country or our way of life. This gets to the question of what constitutes radicalization, lacks a consensus. We have a constitution that protects free speech, free thinking. We have a lot of people in our history who are considered radicals of their time who are today lauded as heroes. Martin luther king, booker t. Washington. There are a whole host of them. We have a society and a culture that prizes and protects peoples ability to think whatever thoughts they want as long as theyre not illegally incurring into other peoples space. Holding radical views doesnt necessarily progress to violent extremism. And theres no typical pathway when we look at it, and weve been studying this for the last year. What is that classic pattern that we can say this is an individual on the way to acts of terrorism . We see a lot of people highly disenchanted, have extreme thoughts but most of them do not evolve into violent extremists. So what we found is in previous outreach initiatives, when were talking about islamist extremists, for them to identify individuals in their communities who are prone to radicalization. That would be left of attack or left of a legal act, often have the unintended result of alienating those communities, creating a sense of paranoia and prosecution. If you look at the efficacy of many of our efforts today, and its very difficult to do as a government in terms of engaging with these communities in terms of what that camera narrative is because were getting into religious thought, ideology and thinking and its not a space most government officials are comfortable talking, nor do they do it very well. Its particularly difficult for western countries to parse and address the ideological foundations and the logical aspects of the radicalization process. Based on these tensions and inconsistent results, and im not just talking the United States. If you follow whats gone on, they have significant challenges in their counterradicalization program where theyve moved more and more to focusing on the individuals assessed to be conducting illegal acts or right on the verge, versus looking to get that Larger Community to the left that may move to the right. Its also about taking care not to antagonize and alienate the majority of the population that do not hold the extremist views and arent prepared to behave in violent ways because we want to avoid contributing to more conversions to violent extremism than were able to have the diversions away from them. Ill briefly read you the different characterizations of approaches to cve from dhs and fbi. If you listen close, dhs, and this is off their website. The dhs cv approach does not focus on radical thought or speech. But instead on preventing violent attacks. Now fbi, which, of course, many of you recognize is the lead federal agency for counterterrorism has a little more robust approach. The fbi approach is to reach people before they cross the line between radical thinking to extremist violence. And then they note one of the key strategies is to reach out to communities and build trust and rapport to stem the tide of violence. And that has been a big challenge for fbi. Fbis relationship with these communities and the Muslim Community in particular is a strained one at best. They are looking to make cases. And its a very difficult balancing act to work with communities. They are opposed to violent behavior. Where are you drawing the line between someone that has legitimate, defensible, radical thinking does not plan on conducting any physical act, but you trading their freedom away because the bureau is concerned about them possibly making that move. The sum result of these tensions is essentially a catch 22. So as not to risk worsening the problem, we and many western counterparts have backed off earlier efforts to divert those most prone to violent extremism before they act out those behaviors. Now were left with the even more challenging proposition of having to wait to intervene until radical thoughts are at the precipice of violence leaving precious little time for error. Thats a tough space for us to operate in, but thats the reality of what were doing. Im going to get to the third and final category, and that gets back to this increasing availability of technology and mass empowerment. This really gets back to this amazingly rapid evolution of mass technology. Its increasing the enablement of small groups all the way down to individuals with the means to cause significant damage that were limited to nation states not many years ago. Im talking five or ten years ago. Capabilities now in the hands of individuals were restricted weaponstype capabilities we had export control for. You can look at your iphone 6 and there are a number of them in that platform. You can use that as a a guidance navigational system for cruise missile. So in fact, theres a book, the future of violence. Its by Benjamin Witts and Gabriela Blum and highlights this trend. Id just comment having read the book, many of us might differ on conclusions on how this might change the world order. They offer a lot of discussion and views about what that does to the nation state. Thats very interesting about the book is they go down the paths of three different rapidly developing technologies. Biotechnology, robotics and cyber. And they posit the different scenarios, what can be done today by small groups all the way to individuals with regard to these advanced technologies and very significant high consequence effects. You look at the tsarnaev brothers in boston. Two midlevel iq knuckleheads who built these devices that were certainly impactful on a local scale. Youre talking about now into four, five years from now these individuals, if only modern intelligence will be able to do paint by numbers biosequencing and develop a biological agent with a synthesizer they can get off the internet. Thats what were talking about. We have not seen it yet, but the potential is there. This is particularly concerning when we talk about homegrown violent extremists because we cant defend against every attack. We recognize that. But the threshold of consequence these individuals and small groups have been able to effect to date, as tragic as it is, have been relatively small. If these types of individuals who we have a very difficult and sometimes impossible time detecting can have high consequence effects, large numbers of casualties and impacts on our economy, were in a really scary place. I fear that dynamic is unfolding. I would just say in sum, against the backdrop of all of our mounting concerns about the growing potential for homegrown, the conventional wisdom these actors are not capable of really having high effect is going to fade. Thank you, mr. Happy. Okay. So i were going to have time to get a few questions to the audience. Be thinking of your questions, that would be great. Ill recognize you and if youd state your name and affiliation and wait for the microphone. Let me unpack a few things first. General, so you lay out this framework of the areas you looked at and areas critical for the counterterrorism mission. Going from the attache, the International Program to the role of intelligence in the fbi, science, technology issues, legal authorities and information sharing, if thats kind of the baskets there. Could you so im guessing if i asked you what the strongest area where the fbi made the most progress its the legatts, the overseas mission. Is that fair . Partially. Theres still a lot more to do. When you go overseas and put your foot in the Atlantic Ocean and come across the state department. And there is a certain bureaucratic resistance to expanding and providing more facilities and resources overseas. Theres still a long ways to go there. I think id rather i think its more accurate to say the farthest theyve gone is in the intelligence and analytical capabilities, and the whole idea of bringing in this new class of ideas. Prior to 9 11, intelligence analysts, i dont think they used that term. They may have called them analysts. They were thought of as support people. Advanced clerks, if you would. Its always been a tradition in the fbi there was a big dividing line between special agents and everybody else. And the intelligence agents were, prior to 9 11, in the other category. Its been the development of the idea of intelligence analysts as coequal. Well, almost coequal at least with special agents. And that is the area thats really improving. Its only been within the last year weve had the joint training where intelligence analysts were in the same classes, same Educational Programs at quantico. So which basket gets the lowest grade . I would say science and technology. Really . I think the computer programs and the communications, the Information Technology as a whole, is probably lagging behind. It was lagging behind before 9 11 in the department of justice and im sure in probably other parts of the intelligence community. Thats the one that needs the budgetary support. I mentioned secure telephones. Youd think that we went to the legatt office in i think it was in london, and there was one secure telephone in the whole place and a little telephone booth. The kind that superman used to change clothes in. And whereas if they had more, again, its a matter of intelligence analysts being able to pick up the phone and talk to someone in dia who is working in the same area and exchange information. If they have to go to a phone or wait for a phone or wait until some other facility is available, that really interferes with their capabilities. I want to ask you one question. Theres a lot of discussion between the congressmans remarks and your points and some of the points david made about countering violent extremism. But i think you alluded to it. Theres kind of two very different but related missions there. One is the space where i think the fbi and Homeland Security kind of figure it out all and operate which is this line between people who have particularly finding the people who have extremist views and are potentially going to operationalize that. We can debate what the best bill is and best structure, but we can say thats appropriately something they should be involved in and ought to figure that out. The other issue is a broader idea. The idea of radical islam which is a different ideology, a different world view, and which is in competition with the United States. Thats a much broader mission, and the different topic. And its arguably something the United States has been completely out to lunch. But i want to ask you about this other one, this more narrow mission of people embracing these views and might have the potential to step over the line. Given, as david said weve got about 170 of these folks or so out of 330 million americans. You look at the number of americans that left to be foreign fighters. Its maybe in the tens, maybe hundreds where given other places its in the thousands. Given the percentage of our population thats radicalizing to the extent they are a problem, whats the right and given all the other ct things we have to do, whats the right level of effort . Its a tiny percentage of the population that you might consider at greater risk, if you are talking about radical islam. So youd be looking at a muslim population, the majority of which is not radical, doesnt share radicalized views. Its a small percentage acting on that. You have a number who are very conservative and may have what many consider to be radical thoughts but they have no intent and have demonstrated no actions in terms of effecting those outcomes in a violent way. This gets back to, and chairman mccaul made the point, and talk to any psychologist. If you want to deal with this kind of ideology you need a counternarrative. Weve done it very poorly. When you are doing a counternarrative against what some consider is a conservative interpretation of their theology, you run into a lot of problems. You arent we want to first do no harm. We have this great majority of a population that are, you know, prize citizens of the country, and we dont want to create more alienation. That is the thats the piece weve wrestled with and not done a very good job. Same for the canadians and brits. Putting the counternarrative issue aside, whats the level of effort we should be looking between do nothing, kind of and manhattan project. Where are we . Where do we need to be . We need to take a risk informed approach. We cannot prevent any individual who may go into a sports store and buy a side arm or rifle and go on a shooting spree. We need to look at who posits the most significant threat . The more significant the threat, the more signatures of activity. If we spend all of our resources trying to divert or identify anyone who may do any act, no matter what the consequence, will run out way before were able to focus on the high threat consequence individuals. And thats where we need to focus. And i think for the most part we do. Its a very difficult public, highly emotional, people respond psychologically in ways to events theres a low probability of happening to them. You have to deal with that dynamic as well. David, let me ask you one last question. When we look at this kind of more narrower part of the encountering violent extremism, just working with people that potentially, and you have looked at the legislation and the cv program and the strategy and everything else. Talk about some of the complications of working through that. Ken mentioned if you do it wrong, you alienate a community. And some of those other things. Could you talk about that . Certainly. Ken alluded to different studies that were done. Theres been some, a recent one done in minneapolis that was a very interesting study and talked about how very often in these projects you can the Main Objective is to link up with state and locals and private sector folks who are going to know whats going on in their community to support them. The federal government cant be the point end of the stick of this one. Are we reaching the right folks and making the right alliances . A lot of groups got funding from the government and great at maintaining the funding from the government but werent able to show significant improvements in what they were doing. Others were able to show very good improvements. How can the government best partner with folks . Thats definitely a challenge in this space. And the other question is in the federal government, who is going to be the the federal government in a support role, who is the best person to take on that support role . I think in your support you addressed the question of should the fbi be doing it . I think you say maybe it should go to dhs. I sort of think dhs may be the right place since they are often working with state and locals. The fbi has that embedded Terrorism Knowledge that is useful. Different places you can put it. Dhs might be the right place to put some sort of coordinating dhs is not doing the cve. Dhs is supporting state and locals and supposed to be contacting with state and locals and doing a lot of that stuff in its daily work is probably the right place to put a coordinating function. So youre operating in this more narrow spatial. A couple of key things regardless of there ought to be kind of metrics of measure of what are you delivering on . And the focus really is more on, when you are engaging these communities, what is the common interest there . Its really the Public Safety of the community. And the protection of the community. Thats what you are really looking at which is that line between the two things. Id encourage people who are interested, the larger issue of the war of ideas with political islam or radical islam, weve done some really excellent panels on that over the last few months. You can find them online at heritage. Just a week ago we did a panel on the state of the play and some excellent panels that went into great detail about whats the difference between islam and islamism. And how is islamism both a political threat but also how it relates to the terrorist threat. If there are questions from the audience. If you would just wait for the microphone and state your name and affiliation, that would be awesome. Susan ashcraft, former police officer, former federal agent, coordinately a pastor. David, of all the statistics, do you have numbers regarding how many were foreign born . How many were born in the u. S. . How many were citizens . How many were here legally . Illegally . I do not have all of those statistics but a project im currently working on im looking to break out some of those statistics. At one point i looked at some of the most recent. There have been a fair number of folks who are naturalized citizens. So ive looked at that. Its sort of an abnormal number relative to the population of folks who are becoming naturalized citizens. You can take the tsarnaevs as an example. One of them was naturalized. Another case was an individual who is one of the more recent plots. He became naturalized. While in the naturalization process was planning a trip to syria. Got naturalized. While in syria was told by someone you should go back and attack the u. S. It is an issue. How well are we assimilating folks into our society. Thats important that we need to look at. First of all, thank you for your service, coming from a family of cops. Thats a great question because it gets to the strengths and limitations of this database. In terms of raw numbers about populations, it doesnt tell you anything useful. Its like profiling. Profiling doesnt get you very far because, yeah, that person was whatever but theres 80 million others that are whatever. So you can see theres a significant percentage that are naturalized. Look at the number of naturalized citizens in the country, it doesnt tell you anything. What you find with only 120 people, there are a tiny percentage of anything other than a terrorist. What its super useful for is it shows processwise things to look at. When we look at the cases of the naturalized persons, it doesnt tell you anything about a naturalized person more likely to be a terrorist but that in the naturalization process there are things were not doing which would much more clearly identify people that you should not have given citizenship to. And thats the kind of stuff in the database thats super useful. And one thing, of course, and thats the returning foreign fighters. When people are going overseas, it seems you immediately have an indication, someone that at least you ought to look into. Theyve gone to syria, the middle east and then come back. And thats one of the tests, more or less, the fbi utilizes in who ought to have intention paid to them. One other thing i think is most important is most of the people who have been radical eyeized and gone into violent extremism have certain characteristics. They are about the same as people who join gangs. They are losers, have low selfesteem, unemployed and categories such as this. While thats not a defining factor, it gives you an idea of the kind of people that get involved in these. There are differing statistics on that. I think that may be more true, for example, to those who are going the foreign fighter route. Less true for al qaedatype operators. If you go back and look at 9 11. Educated from wealthy families. And you have not seen across the board a high incidence of the down and outers that some conventional wisdom has had. Not to say there arent pockets. Its also worth noting theres two theres two aspects to the foreign fighter problem. The you, one people think of is oh, these guys, or girls, are going to go there and come back and be terrorists or recruit terrorists. And thats true to some extent. I think whats more is they are recruiting going over that. It shows that if anything, its kind of like voting on american idol. It doesnt matter if they accomplish much. The fact they are coming there allows the claim this is a caliphate, this is growing, this is important. Shutting this pipeline down is an important part of diminishing the brand of isis as well. Yes, maam, and youre probably going to be our last question. Susan crabtree with the washington examiner. Ive been covering this terror twitter problem and trying to get more down to probably a question that was better for mccaul, but since i need to write about this today im trying to ask it to the panel. Out facebook and other social media sites. 200,000 leads going on a day is it you seemed to dodge the question and talk about the dark space being a real problem. Jamestown we talked about twitter and the message being dangerous but he also talked about the dark space. Im wondering if the white house had asked them if the white house is letting twitter go about letting twitter be more lenient because Law Enforcement has an interest in the open space and they are not cracking down on twitter when waiting on them as much. If that is a helpful tool because you can track them and i would love to talk about the state departments failed efforts in the counter narrative is theyre have been a lot of Washington Post articles talking about is the complete lack of effort. They havethey have had programs but it seems like to have all been either failing or gone too far. Lets run down the panel and ill give you the option comment on social network with the state departments role or a little bit of both. Sure. No social the government would allow the communication and is being nicer to twitter. It seems to me that it could be a way that they can glean intelligence. It also seems like a mighty doubleedged sword as you allow them to communicate a lot. I have no specific intelligence what the government is doing but it seems like theyre would be a fine line. On the counter narrative that is to be a cooperative effort by number of different agencies not the least of which shallto employ saw the psychological warfare capabilities military has which is an important part. Adding to that i dont think it is something the government does well and it needs to evolve to aa publicprivate type process where you have some government element to it but it is not solely government. The other. I would make is, at least the studies i havei have seen with regard to recruitment online, it is an important tool, but it is the studies have not shown i indication that solely online recruiting has resulted in conversions to violent extremism. You still need the physical presence of someone who we will close the deal which is important. There has been so much focus. We tend to think that that is the problem command i dont think thats correct. Katie. 70 million twitter followers why . That is a Virtual Community and a Virtual Community found by a certain level of common interest which does not mean anyone will do anything she says. What makes this dangerous is theyre is a social network Virtual Community that links which is what maximizes the impact of social network. Theynetwork. They are rooted in groups of people that are going to do something. Compare with what we saw in the green revolution in iran. There was a massive social network which was moving all these ideas. Why waswhy was it . There people on the ground going into the streets. A linkage between human and virtual web which makes the virtual web powerful which tells you whether than concentrating on the phenomenon of the most significant thing that you can do to diminish the value is to diminish the value of physical network. This is notthis is not just in terms of network of people and our countries but this thriving, growing metastasizing menace in the middle east that is claiming a state. I would touch on that comment. What are the true size of the nature of the threat. Theretheyre is a huge delta that the psychological an actual threat. If you look at the numbers of folks on twitter for one thing that is fascinating and surprising is how few attacks and. He is relatively small numbers. Why didnt they focus on attacks to the United States . Isis has its own agenda but if they were intent many of you with inspire Magazine Online recruitment and how to manual. This isthis is the winter of 2014 issue gives detailed instructions about how to make explosives in your moms kitchen the cover of the indicators and science. We have not seen near the kind of use. This number of actors. They can all be sleeper cells but you need to take with a grain of salt the level of hyperbole. I am the one who talked about Technology Enablers which is real command we have to be cognizant of that in terms of how the future state in terms of what is available can change the game. Youre not seeing a lot of adherents in terms of action that is good news. You could have had a session and people could have come in. You did not here that. You did not here an assessment. You heard options and a discussion about how to make arrested for risk informed decision of Different Things we can and should do. That is where good Public Policy decision should be. Thank you. [applause] [inaudible conversations]