International terrorism and domestic violent extremism. The center for strategic and International Studies hosted two panels on the evolving nature of terrorist threats in 2019, as well as solutions to help Law Enforcement combat such threats. This is two hours and 10 minutes. We have two panels on increasingly important subject. Part of the motivation looking at this i have to give suzanne credit for being the toinchild behind this was look at recent attacks including el paso and the synagogue attacks. And note there has been a dialoguedebate within the u. S. How to respond to it, the degree of threats and how serious it is and how to respond to it. What we would like to do is move in the following cents, we will begin with the discussion about the evolution of the threat, and how domestic terrorism i know some terminology is the racially motivated violent extremist groups. I cannot promise the panelists will use that term. Aware we are talking about roughly the same subject. We will move into a second panel that will debate and discuss the implications and the way forward, and the issues we have to grapple with. I will not read through the bios, but we try to include a combination of people in the first panel with experience looking at the violent extremists, ones that have been motivated or worked with al qaeda and the Islamic State. We have Nick Rasmussen the senior director for the at the mccainsm institute. Many of you know his government director offormal the counterterrorism center. Weiner, thecca assistant commissioner for intelligence analysis at nypd. There was an oped last week week that looks at this issue and then george, Senior Vice President of programs and the former director of Homeland Security. You have a range of views on the subject. A couple of points of order before we begin, we are going to have a discussion for about 40 minutes or so and then we will open it up to questions from you. Please remember this is about questions. If you give a monologue, i will cut you off and ask where the question is. Speak into the microphone. Raise your hand. We will call on you. You can identify yourself and ask your question into the microphone. That would be great. Second, if there is an not expectand we do there to be one, the policy is to move to the National Geographic museum, which has a cafeteria and is located next door. That was not an indication to go there before or after, although you can if you want. With that, we will start and i will sit down. Thank you for coming. Nick, why dont you start us off. Give us a sense after 9 11, the u. S. Government focuses on al qaeda and the Islamic State. We have added other kinds of extremist threats in the u. S. , attacks from farright, white supremacist groups and farleft groups and others. How do you see this issue evolving over time . Thanks for the opportunity. I will use the broadest of brushes in offering thoughts on the way the threat has evolved over time. I will do that, there are a number of people in the audience who have their hands on orious National Intelligence other key documents that framed this problem. With apologies to some of those folks who might shake their heads if i generalize about the nature of the threat. It is fair to say after 9 11, the first several years, we were al qaeda focused. That is not surprising. That was the terrorism threat most proximate to the United States. We still are early in our minds had a model in mind of an organization that was trying to penetrate the United States, that was trying to infiltrate operatives, sleeper cells, Clandestine Operations to get individuals inside the United States to carry out terrorist attacks. We developed a strong capability to detect that kind of threat using our intelligence and tools. Over time as al qaeda metastasized and became not just an organization we were dealing asia, but a global organization, the challenge and pressure placed on the Homeland Security apparatus to succeed got intense at times. And then i would argue the threat began to shift to one that actually became much more challenging, that of the socalled homegrown violent extremist. The idea we were not as day by theday by sleeper cell from abroad, but instead the individual who would be inspired, who would be motivated and encouraged, propelled into action by an ideology or actual individuals overseas. That became a much more difficult and challenging problem for Law Enforcement because identifying those individuals in the absence of the usual communication was not going to be easy. That was already a problem at the time isis came onto the scene and supplanted al qaeda as our principal concern overseas. The isis phenomenon only accelerated those trends in terms of the homegrown extremist problem. I wont go into why that is so. This is a sophisticated audience. You know how capable the Islamic State was and is in its ability to use modern tools to motivate individuals. That hve model is one i would argue translates very well to this new threat we are talking about today. These are most likely to be individuals operating outside of the group structure. They are not drawn from some kind of playbook that a group published. They are not carrying a lanyard that says i belong to this group, and it follows this structure. I would be interested to hear from rebecca on this. At least in terms of volume, if you go by what the fbi is saying publicly, and director wray has been upfront about this, the caseload the fbi is managing on this concern has with the samepar concerns. I will close by saying this, in the overseas environment where people are saying, arent you spun up over domestic terrorism, we are, we should be. Dont forget you cant go a day without also reading of an arrest, prosecution, or disruption involving what we would Call International terrorism, tied to the ideology propagated by isis or al qaeda. It is not as if one went up, and the other went down. We are dealing with a problem of rough parity right now. Turning from nicks overview to new york city, two questions, how are you seeing this play out, this international and domestic terrorism play out in new york . And the second is, on the domestic side, including domestic groups, farright example, how are they structured . How informal is it . How do you characterize it . Thank you for having me here. It is great to reflect a little bit on this threat. Nypd has a different position on the matter. I think if we want to understand this threat, motivated violent extremism or white supremacist extremism, we have a toolkit to understand it. What we see in new york looks similar to the homegrown landscape. You are dealing with a very similar set of actors who are angry, often disenfranchised in some way or another, who are seeking an ideology that justifies their violent intentions rather than driven in a formal way, like was how years ago with al qaeda, driven by that ideology. Also demographically more diverse than one might imagine. Our textbook examples are slightly broader spectrum than we may think. The radicalization process is somewhat similar among hve subcultures that are spending from open to closed forms, and increasingly telegrams, where individuals are disseminating propaganda that looks like propaganda we are used to from isis. Some formal aesthetic similarities as well. In terms of defining ideological pillars, there are text that drive, whether the loan actor or formal groups, similar to what we have seen in the isis world. It is a difference that is, there are more similarities than differences. The mobilization to violence also bears similarities. Tactically you see the same lowtech doityourself style tactics we see if we look back to unite the right vehicle ramming, which is out of isis. The Mass Shootings we saw in el paso and in pittsburgh. I would say what this means for local Law Enforcement is that we need to rely upon the tools we have developed, starting from 9 11. In the 2010 timeframe where these shifted radically, to be hve, the loan actor. This is a conventional fleet of tools. If we cite the new york city numbers, and this goes back to your point about numbers. Theres been 32 formal or disrupted plots against new york city since 9 11. We have seen a couple of shifts over that timeframe. If you separated it into two phases, you see 12 incidents in the first nine years after 9 11. 20 and the second nine years. That is a dramatic uptick. The actor has changed quite dramatically. Of the 12 in the first nine years, two were homegrown. 10 external. Since the 2009 timeframe theres been 15 we would think about in the homegrown context. Two were white supremacist extremism. That shift in actor, the acceleration in pace in terms of trying to Way International or hve versus domestic, we are seeing more of the international hve, we have begun looking a lot harder like when James Harris Jackson traveled to new york city to fatally stab an africanamerican man. He did this because new york he thought of as the Media Capital where his attack would be amplified by the media which would help to drive the more recent incident, which is less formally what we would think of as white supremacist violence. This is a spectrum of activity. Given the similarities, we should not be surprised to see what we have started to see in terms of individuals we would not characterize as one or the other. If you look at the person who killed his roommates in florida, fascinating example of somebody who switched allegiance from a Violent White Supremacist Group to isis. This case is cited for a lot of different points. We have to remember that people who are looking for ideology to justify violence will often look for multiple, conflicting ideologies. We will continue to see this rring of and blu ideologies. Rebecca, can you talk so we get a lot of the cards on the table, to what degree are you seeing in the new york area threats, intent, and capabilities from antifa or some of the environmental groups like the environmental liberation front and the anarchists . Some of these groups are networks that feed off of each other. Absolutely. We do see that in new york. New york has been a center of gravity for the Anarchist Movement for quite some time. Ate tend to see, the concern we are focused on is this idiosyncratic opportunistic lone actor threat. We are also interested in the formal groups and we see this cycle of violence. That tends to take place in terms of street violence. If you look at the proud boys, that brawl that happened after the Republican Club a year and a half ago, that is the threat we have to take note of as lawenforcement. We need to make sure the streets are safe. We view that as reciprocal and important. We view that as less likely to result in the same kind of mass shooting, copycat subculture of more profound ideological hate than some of these other actors. They are important. In terms of threats, that is a much more familiar pattern for us. George, from your perspective, where you are now and where you came from, how do you see adl has a lot of data on the domestic threat front. How do you see that . And picking up on what everybody is saying, how do you compare and contrast to the threat we dealt with in the first decade and a half after 9 11 . Thank you for convening this really important set of conversations. It is great to be with colleagues i worked with a long time. In terms of laying down the data, three points i want to make sure we understand, the first is that calendar year 2017, we saw a 57 increase in antisemitic incidents across the country. You might wonder, why is that relevant . That same year, there was a 17 increase in hate crimes across the country. The reason i lead with this statistic is because we know across the country, and we have seen this, incidents of antisemitism are the canary in the coal mine. If you have an incident of antisemitism, there is likely an incident of islamophobia or racism, homophobia that happens in that same municipality. We know we have seen a marked increase in bias and hate motivated violence and crime across the country. In calendar year 2018, over 90 of murders and homicides attributed to ideological motivated violence were at the hands of white supremacist White Nationalist ideologies. Over 50 murders and homicides. That is in the context of the past decade of data that shows 73 of violent murders and homicides, actual killing of people, was at the hands of rightwing white supremacist associated ideology, not jihad terrorism. As we look at the indicators of hate and bigotry, coupled with what we see overall, with murders and homicides, we know we have a combustible mix. To the point nick started to allude to on what we have seen in the post 9 11 era and in new york, the tools and infrastructure of the federal government that had been building from the bush to the obama administration, the infrastructure, for prevention and tools for state and local governments to prevent and intervene in the process of radicalization, in the Current Administration have been plusated in the last two years. When we look at the staffing and the programs, we look at the authorities, there has been a cut in those. When you look at the data of the threat and the resources applied to prevent or intervene, they do not add up. You have spent your last job in government looking at the terrorism threat from a global perspective. What is striking if you look at the last couple of years from the far right threat, we have seen attacks in christchurch, the mosque attack in the u. K. , the assassination of an mp. To what degree is this becoming or was a much more serious global issue . Or one that moves across europe and australia and new zealand . I want to be cautious about that. Theres a lot we need to learn. What i can say, there is an International Dimension to this problem. We need to do more to understand that. Does that mean it is going to look like isis, like al qaeda . Of course not. There may be a transnational and International Dimension. What we learned in the aftermath of christchurch suggests that individual had international contacts. He had traveled internationally. He was engaged internationally. He found himself among likeminded travelers in this movement. To me, that argues for doing more to understand that nature. That means opening a conversation with partners that is broader than it has been in the past. I say this not with any sense of pride, but for all of the years where i have been across from other countries, senior counterterrorism officials, talking about terrorism, not once did it include a conversation about this dimension. What we would call domestic terrorism. That was because of the way our system is architected as opposed to what fell within other agencies. It is a feature of the landscape. The idea we would not try to maximize the kind of intelligence and information we could get by talking openly about our challenges and wanting to learn about the set of challenges that our partners feel, that is an obvious step we should be taking. I imagine we are. I am glad and i hope those expand. I want to be careful. I dont want to assume because the problem is pressing and at the top of our agenda right now it looks the same way as our post 9 11 concerns. Lets dig into it and find out if those individuals who are connecting with likeminded individuals overseas, are they going to be on that, engaging in the sharing of tactics and technology and other tools that allow them to be more effective in their homegrown activity . Or are they dabbling and sharing frustrations . Or is there a network here . I dont think we know the answer. To what degree is it a challenge when we deal with the subject of domestic terrorism and sharing information across agencies . We are talking about u. S. Citizens potentially operating in the u. S. We know with individuals with the rise above movement, a number of them before arrest traveled to ukraine, to italy, to celebrate adolf hitlers birthday in germany, i suspect when people leave the country, there are tools available to monitor their activity. How is this different from an International Terrorist organization in terms of sharing across Government Agencies . It is a complicating factor. That would have been true even talking about sharing information on u. S. Nationals in the context of International Terrorism. For example, i used to point this as a silver lining, and there are not many Silver Linings in the isis experience. Agencies to be more willing to share with our partners overseas. We certainly needed that reciprocal cooperation from them. When we had cases involving u. S. Nationals traveling to fight for isis or the conflict zone in iraq and syria, that was information we were now prepared in ways we were not previously to share with partners and in ways that did elicit greater cooperation from foreign partners talking about their nationals. That is always a sensitive subject. I am not sure the same phenomenon or dynamic applies in this space because it is a challenging set of circumstances. In many cases youre talking about an individuals perceived political activity and political views. How much of that should we be willing to share, or in a position to share with foreign partners overseas . I recognize the kind of dilemma that may pose for Law Enforcement and intelligence agencies in terms of figuring out what is appropriate to share. Seth rebecca, im wondering if you can unpack what the potential threat looks like. In terms of the plots that have been disrupted or even attacks that have been successful the last couple of years, what are you seeing some of the trendlines in terms of the types of tactics that individuals are using, or how they are attempting to recruit individuals for an audienc