about attacks in america and we can't shine a light on the communications through the darkness. now, you know, as a policymaker and jim appreciates this, we, civil liberties and privacy, but we need to find a solution to this so we can better stop it. otherwise, if we can't see the communications, we can't stop it. you know, if the guy in chattanooga was operating in dark space with the guys in syria, it will make a good case for why we need to fix that problem. and you talk to -- i talked to the director of the fbi and jay johnson, secretary of homeland, this is one of their biggest concerns. they can't, you know, lawfully, you know, monitor these communications. >> so, we'll take one last question. down here? >> thanks. can i stay seated? >> sure.

>> you know, i think we can all agree that trying to monitor cyber space is futile, lawfully or unlaw fly. given that this is a war of ideology, is there any plan on the table for policy to try to exploit that ideology in that seems to be what the crux of this is. recruits will be replenished as long as they can be reached out to, so, do we have a way to counter this ideology, understand it, use it against them? >> it's a great question. again, i think -- when i go to my -- what i was proposing in terms of a ground force, it's got to be under american leadership with our guys imbedded, but it's time for the sunni arab nations to provide that ground force. they tell me they will, if there was a strategy. i met with world leaders. they will do that if there's a strategy and assad is part of the equation. when the infidel sets foot, you know, the last resort, either we try to do this or we do 100,000 u.s. combat troops.

you know, that's kind of the choices that we have. that is an option that should be on the table, but when you do that, when i talk to centcom, you enflame them, because the infidel is on their land, so, i think there's a smart approach, a smart way to do this without inflaming them, an indigenous force, sunni moderates defeat sunni extremists. that seems to be me, under american leadership, the counternarrative is not there. that's the purpose for my bill, to counter violent extremism here at home. but the state department doesn't have the counternarrative to defeat it abroad. in fact, when i met at centcom, the d.o.d. has a lot of this technology capability to do it, and the ambassador was there at the meeting and i'm urging them to start this counternarrative.

so that they know that if you go to syria, it's not disneyland, you know? you're going to get put on the front lines, probably blown up. your wife and kids will be taken away. "frontline" did a great special. not that i'm always watching pbs. >> it's good. >> they did a great special, enslaving isis women, bartering them off for weapons and $500. it's horrific what they do. the videos i see every week are just chilling. the lack of humanity. and that's the counternarrative, i think, that needs to be out there more. at the end of the day, it's providing stability in these countries. power vacuums, when they fall, you have a vacuum, failed states, and it breeds terrorism. and after we saw the arab spring, we have seen libya and yemen, we have no intelligence. we've had to pull out of northern, many places in northern africa, we pulled out completely out of iraq and syria

we're trying to get back in now. these famed states breed it and without a counternarrative, and a strategy to deal with it, it's going to continue to breed and thrive and that's the -- the problem, it's metastasized so greatly globally, that's what worries me. >> i'm going to ask you all to join with me in a small round of administrative jujitsu. so, in a second, i'm going to ask you to join me in thanking congressman mccaul in this conversation. but as soon as he exits the stage, i'd ask our panel to just jump up and so if you would just hold in place, our panel will jump up and i'll jump right into it so, please join me in thanking the congressman. >> thanks, jim. really appreciate it.

>> remember i told you the story that i lost secretary rumsfeld's bio, so i couldn't introduce him? i just lost all their bios. maybe it's a pattern, i don't know. but fortunately, i know all these guys and they are pretty awesome. this is really -- this is a terrific panel, because what you have here is just a mix of expertise and knowledge, which is really kind of unusual to bring together, so, ken has -- minor, right? >> and, so, you have this minor job in the white house, right?

when you were in the white house, working in the homeland security council staff as the adviser, so, you have -- you see this from the perspective, somebody advising and working at the department every day and somebody that really worked at this on the inside at the highest level. general meese was not just the attorney general of the united states, but for many, many years, one of our most distinguished scholars here at the heritage foundation and i told him beforehand that he works harder now than he's retired than when he did when he was on active duty here. among the things general meese has done, in addition to dealing with these issues for many, many decades, he recently served on a very important commission that reviewed the counterterrorism functions of the fbi, so here's somebody with years and years of knowledge and experience, who has had an opportunity to do an in depth assessment of a key component of this. and david, who is our policy

analyst on homeland security, who works this stuff every day and not just the entire department, but really the entire homeland security enterprise, which means all the federal agencies, state and local, international partners are doing this, so you've got three amazing perspectives and i'll ask each of them to make some remarks and then we'll get in as much q and a at the end as we possibly -- we have a saying at heritage that sometimes we start late, but we also end on time. so, how should we start? start with you and work or way down? >> yeah, thanks jim. thanks, everyone, for coming today. i'm going to use my time today to lay out some of the statistics and trends that the u.s. has been seeing in its long war against islamist terrorism and i'm going to give general recommendations, echoing what chairman mccaul just said on what we can do to better counter this threat. the heritage foundation has been tracking islamist terror plots

against the united states homeland since 9/11. this data tells me that the u.s. has faced more terrorists plots and attacks in 2015 than we have seen in any prior year. and we're only in july of this year. so, just to echo chairman mccaul, this is the most dynamic period of terrorist activity that the u.s. has seen since 9/11, all according to publicly available information. there could be other classified information which we do not have access to and do not know about. the statements by the fbi, they're tracking hundreds of individuals, you know, across all 50 states for islamist terrorist activity, it is clear we do have a very serious problem. now, at the outset, i want to quickly describe what it is we do when -- how it is we categorize, what the criteria are when we look at what is a terror plot? first, it has to be a concrete plot against the united states homeland with action taken to further that plot. not just rantings, not support of terrorism. if someone wants to travel

abroad to support isis, we don't consider that a plot, a terrorist plot against the u.s. homeland. it has to be a terrorist act as defined by various statues. that would be motivated by an islamic ideology. espousing terror to achieve that goal. and generally we also look for an official statement by the government, law enforcement that indicate this was an act of terror. usually indicated by criminal charges, but that's not always the case. take the ft. hood shooting. that was characterized as workplace violence. that's not always the case with that criteria. so, with these criteria in mind, we have been watching and recorded 72 islamist terrorist plots since 9/11 that are known. of these plots, five were successful. u.s. law enforcement foiled or helped foil 59. international law enforcement foiled or helped foil ten and we got lucky three times.

obviously there's some overlap in those categories. these plots involved 171 individuals in total. and at least 27 of these individuals were trained in terrorist camps abroad. 61 of the 72 plots were home grown. these folks were here in the united states when they were radicalized. they didn't get their ideology why they were staying abroad. they were staying here in the united states. and 28 were foiled by law enforcement stings. now, what exactly were they targeting? the number one homeland target for islamist terrorists has been the u.s. military. either personnel or actual bases. 19 plots or attacks have gone after our military. the second-most common target is new york city, with 16 plots, followed by mass gathering, bars, concerts, et cetera, at 12 plots. mass transit systems are the fourth-most common target and washington, d.c. and law

enforcement tie for the fifth-most common target. not a list you want to be on. the recent plots, however, have been unique. all the plots this year have been inspired by or directed by isis. while most prior attacks were done by individuals who were inspired by or directed by al qaeda, one of their affiliates, to have all ten plots in the past six months all be connected to one group shows the influence isis has. it's not a coincidence that we've seen this spike in terrorism as isis has risen to prominence. during the past year, we've also seen a spike in the plots against law enforcement and our military. which makes sense, given the fact that isis has directly called for violence against law enforcement, intelligence and military officials. so, the question is, what do we do about this? my panelists will have an opportunity to dive into some more details but i want to spend

some time hitting, touching on two broad ideas which chairman mccaul has already touched on. first, it's critical that the united states take a proactive approach to combatting terrorism. when we treat terrorism just like a crime that, you know, we can combat with law enforcement, normal law enforcement tools, we can defer it, punish it after the fact, we misunderstand the nature of the threat. terrorists are happy to, and sometimes even want to die in pursuit of their goal. the bigger bang they make, the more likely they are to get us to change our behavior so they're looking for those big opportunities. they're looking to hurt us and criminal punishment after the fact is not an effective deterrent. further more, they are often looking for soft targets, very easily attacked. take the most recent plot in boston, alex ciccolo wanted to attack boston bars and college campus, or look at tunisia and the attack on the resort there. these are soft targets. they're not guarded by security or a lot of security very often.

so, the point is that security isn't enough. we can't have security officers everywhere. we simply can't do that. security is helpful. it can help us in preventing an attack from getting out of hand. take garland, texas, for example. but that was too close for comfort, i think we can all agree. what we need to be doing is look at how we can be more proactive. how can we stop the plots before the terrorists even get close to putting the public in danger? and this means that law enforcement needs to have the tools, the lawful intelligence tools available to them to find terrorists, to put together the dots, the intelligence dots, and to make sure that the public is never put in danger. it also does mean that we have to improve the way that the u.s. goes about counters violent extremism, to make sure that we are preventing individuals from radicalizing to begin with. secondly, the u.s. does need to do more to defeat isis abroad.

the reality is the success of isis is attracting followers. a lot has been made of isis and their use of social media. and there's no doubt isis is effective at using social media and other online tools. it's not just social media causing individuals to take up arms for isis. social media is just a tool that isis is using to display its message that it is a caliphate in possession of real territory that they can defend and expand. this success is compelling. it's a compelling message to many in the world. so long as isis is able to claim the success, would-be terrorists would flock to their cause. this means the u.s. and its allies need to take steps to defeat isis and other islamist groups. greater intelligence and law enforcement cooperation is obviously needed. it is needed to help uncover and prevent plots from abroad from

coming here to the united states. also working to curtail the flow of foreign fighters and monitor those foreign fighters if and when they try to return back to the west. there are also other things the u.s. should be doing. the role of dhs fusion centers. i'm going to leave some of those topics for my co-panelists. le the important take away that i want to convey here is that the terrorist threat is very real. more so than at any time since 9/11. this is not about fear mongering. the u.s. cannot be complacent. this isn't about fear mongering about but accurate the grasping the nature of the threat we face and we can pursue policies that prevent terrorists from striking us at home and do more to defeat their message out in the world. >> i've been asked to talk about the fbi and the review commission. of which i was a part and what we found. the fbi has been involved in counterterrorism and terrorism activities for a long time. at the time i was in the

department, which i recognize suddenly is almost 30 years ago but at that time the terrorist groups were mostly overseas like the red army faction. and most of the attacks that affected the united states were on u.s. citizens who happened to be abroad. of course, 9/11 was the big change, the start of a whole new era of terrorism for the united states, and so the 9/11 commission was formed, and they did an extensive review of what the united states as a government and as a whole as a country had to do. they worked for almost a couple of years and then continued to monitor the situation after that. and one of the major decisions they had to make was shall we follow britain and canada and some other countries that established a different organization from their law enforcement agencies to deal

with terrorism. and i think, wisely, they decided the answer was no. it was to give the charge and responsibility to the fbi, but a changed fbi. and actually what they said in their final report was, they said that we needed a specialized and integrated national security workforce established in the fbi, consisting of agents, analysts, linguists and surveillance specialists recruited, trained and rewarded and retained to ensure the development of a an institutional culture with a deep expertise in intelligence and national security. and so that was what the charge was then to the fbi of what they should be doing as a -- but this required a great many changes in the fbi itself. for one thing, there was a change in terms of mission. the job of the fbi in criminal intelligence, in criminal

investigation is primarily after something has happened to find out who done it and then to gain the evidence and gather the evidence so they can be successfully prosecuted. the intelligence role is a new role and that is to find out what's going on to prevent something from happening as david has properly talked about in the elaborate analysis he's done of the plots we've had over the years. secondly, this meant an organizational change instead of the bureau having the criminal investigation division as the primary focus of the bureau, there's a parallel focus on intelligence and the counterterrorism mission to carry out this role of prevention. and this brought then a great cultural change in the fbi. you not only have special agents, the people who carry guns and badges and handcuffs

but a bunch of smart people coming into the fbi who had degrees in foreign area studies and who were linguists, specialized in international relations. and they had to be given a status equal to and comparable to the special agents themselves. and this required a great deal of cultural change and understanding on the part of the people who had traditionally been special agents of the fbi. so our commission looked at what was happening in terms of all of this. how this was going. and our overall finding was that the bureau had made great progress. they got off to a very good start. they made some extensive progress, but that a lot still had to be done and particularly, something that the congressman mccaul mentioned, was we had to increase the pace, the speed with which they were gearing up and expanding their activities

to keep pace with the accelerating threats we face throughout the world, many of which were discussed by the congressman and david at this point. so that was our overall recommendations. the vision that we as a commission came up with was that the future of the fbi was to be an organization that might be described in these terms. an fbi in which criminal investigation, counterintelligence, intelligence collection and analysis and science and technology are all complementary what we call core competencies, core applications of a global intelligence and investigative organization. rather than its prior incarnation as primarily a domestic organization. and the idea was that the u.s. domestic intelligence, which had its global aspects with the fbi

as its hub, would be a collaborative enterprise. this is really important. optimizing the integration of international, federal, state, local and community players, including a considerable amount of activity in which the private sector would also be involved. one of these major functions, of course, was the building up of an analytical function. and this involved bringing in as i mentioned, intelligence analysts at a very high level. and it was necessary to develop a recruiting program because we had to go and are continuing to go into colleges and universities to find the kinds of people who have these skills. the analytical skills but also the background in international relations and the like. it involved new training and education programs. and one of the major changes was at quantico at the fbi academy

to have special agents and intelligence analysts training in the same classes that were relevant to what they were doing in terms of intelligence, and training together and working together at the start of their careers so that they would continue that. it was a matter of assigning the intelligence analysts for the first time, really, to field offices. to the 57 field divisions around the country working side by side in the squads that pertain to this with the special agents. and it also meant changing the field offices. providing a new form of leadership in the field offices. in every one of these major divisions there was a necessity of having people who provided leadership. assistant special agents in charge who would have that as their primary responsibility of supervising the intelligence activities going on there. it meant also a change in status

of the intelligence analysts and the acceptance by special agents of them as full professionals in terms of their competition, in terms of their status. their informal status within the organization and the kinds of opportunities they had. opportunities to go overseas. opportunities to have interagency responsibilities to go to other agencies like the defense intelligence agency, nasa, other places they could expand their professional capability by field work with other agencies so they would become truly a part of the intelligence community as a whole. today we have 16 or 17, depending on how you count them, different intelligence agencies in the federal government. it was increasing the scope and understanding of both special

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. it's 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. it's 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 what's 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, what's going on in the mosques and coffee houses, these things are probably best known to local law enforcement. it's then how to integrate that information with others the fbi and analysts and special agents are collecting so that we have a picture of what's going on in terms of potential terrorist activities. and the importance of the legal authorities. we've had a great debate, as was discussed in the preceding activities here, but the importance of the patriot act and the importance of the nsa's 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 hasn't 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. it's been difficult to make the cultural changes, but they've made remarkable progress up until now. the new director is totally

behind the recommendtations that we have made. i think there's a bright future for the fbi, but it's very important there be one because the future of the fbi will be the way in which this country is protected against terrorism. >> okay. >> i'm 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 home-grown violent extremists. when we use that term, it's 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 home-grown 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 i'll 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 we're focusing more, of late, on those who are actually about to or currently breaking the law versus those to the left. i'll 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, home-grown 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 home-grown violent extremists. of course, our concerns are reinforced by the events in chattanooga. characterized by either lone

wolves, individuals who are operating, either self-radicalized 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 home-grown violent extremist is they are extremely difficult to detect or prevent. if there's a silver lining, particularly we've 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 aren't 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 we're 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 people's ability to think whatever thoughts they want as long as they're not illegally incurring into other people's space. holding radical views doesn't necessarily progress to violent extremism. and there's no typical pathway when we look at it, and we've 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 we're 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 it's very difficult to do as a government in terms of engaging with these communities in terms of what that camera narrative is because we're getting into religious thought, ideology and thinking and it's not a space most government officials are comfortable talking, nor do they do it very well. it's 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 i'm not just talking the united states. if you follow what's gone on, they have significant challenges in their counterradicalization program where they've 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. it's also about taking care not to antagonize and alienate the majority of the population that do not hold the extremist views and aren't prepared to behave in violent ways because we want to avoid contributing to more conversions to violent extremism than we're able to have the diversions away from them.

i'll 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. fbi's relationship with these communities and the muslim community in particular is a strained one at best.

they are looking to make cases. and it's 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 we're 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. that's a tough space for us to

operate in, but that's the reality of what we're doing. i'm 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. it's 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. i'm talking five or ten years ago. capabilities now in the hands of individuals were restricted weapons-type 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, there's a book, "the future of violence." it's by benjamin witts and gabriela blum and highlights this trend. i'd 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. that's 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 mid-level iq knuckleheads who built these devices that

were certainly impactful on a local scale. you're 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. that's what we're talking about. we have not seen it yet, but the potential is there. this is particularly concerning when we talk about home-grown violent extremists because we can't 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, we're 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 home-grown, the conventional wisdom these actors are not capable of really having high effect is going to fade. >> thank you, mr. happy. okay. so i -- we're going to have time to get a few questions to the audience. be thinking of your questions, that would be great. i'll recognize you and if you'd 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 that's kind of the baskets there. could you -- so i'm guessing if i asked you what the strongest area where the fbi made the most progress it's the legatts, the overseas mission. is that fair? >> partially. there's 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. there's still a long ways to go there. i think i'd rather -- i think it's more accurate to say the

farthest they've 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 don't think they used that term. they may have called them analysts. they were thought of as support people. advanced clerks, if you would. it's 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. it's been the development of the idea of intelligence analysts as co-equal. well, almost co-equal at least with special agents. and that is the area that's really improving. it's only been within the last year we've 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 i'm sure in probably other parts of the intelligence community. that's the one that needs the budgetary support. i mentioned secure telephones. you'd 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, it's 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. there's a lot of discussion between the congressman's remarks and your points and some of the points david made about countering violent extremism. but i think you alluded to it. there's 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 that's 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. that's a much broader mission, and the different topic. and it's -- 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 we've 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. it's maybe in the tens, maybe

hundreds where given other places it's in the thousands. given the percentage of our population that's radicalizing to the extent they are a problem, what's the right -- and given all the other ct things we have to do, what's the right level of effort? >> it's a tiny percentage of the population that you might consider at greater risk, if you are talking about radical islam. so you'd be looking at a muslim population, the majority of which is not radical, doesn't share radicalized views. it's 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. we've 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 aren't -- 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 don't want to create more alienation. that is the -- that's the piece we've wrestled with and not done a very good job. same for the canadians and brits. >> putting the counternarrative issue aside, what's 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 we're able to focus on the high threat consequence individuals. and that's where we need to focus. and i think for the most part we do. it's a very difficult public, highly emotional, people respond psychologically in ways to events there's 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. there's 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 what's going on in their community to support them. the federal government can't 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 weren't 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? that's 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 you're 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? it's really the public safety of the community.

and the protection of the community. that's what you are really looking at which is that line between the two things. i'd encourage people who are interested, the larger issue of the war of ideas with political islam or radical islam, we've 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 what's 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 i'm currently working on i'm 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 i've looked at that. it's 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. that's important that we need to look at. >> first of all, thank you for your service, coming from a family of cops. that's a great question because it gets to the strengths and limitations of this database. in terms of raw numbers about populations, it doesn't tell you anything useful. it's like profiling. profiling doesn't get you very far because, yeah, that person was whatever but there's 80 million others that are whatever.

so you can see there's a significant percentage that are naturalized. look at the number of naturalized citizens in the country, it doesn't tell you anything. what you find with only 120 people, there are a tiny percentage of anything other than a terrorist. what it's super useful for is it shows processwise things to look at. when we look at the cases of the naturalized persons, it doesn't tell you anything about a naturalized person more likely to be a terrorist but that in the naturalization process there are things we're not doing which would much more clearly identify people that you should not have given citizenship to. and that's the kind of stuff in the database that's super useful. >> and one thing, of course, and that's 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. they've gone to syria, the middle east and then come back.

and that's 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 self-esteem, unemployed and categories such as this. while that's 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 qaeda-type 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 aren't pockets. >> it's also worth noting there's two -- there's 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 that's true to some extent. i think what's more is they are recruiting going over that. it shows that if anything, it's kind of like voting on "american idol." it doesn't 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, ma'am, and you're probably going to be our last question.

>> susan crabtree with the washington examiner. i've 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 i'm 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. i'm 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 department's failed efforts in the counter narrative is they're 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. >> let's run down the panel and i'll give you the option comment on social network with the state department's 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 double-edged sword as you allow them to communicate a lot. i have no specific intelligence what the government is doing but it seems like they're 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 don't think it is something the government does well and it needs to evolve to aa public-private 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 don't think that's 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 they're 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. therethey're 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 didn't 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 mom's 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. you're 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]