New government terrorism report provides little useful information

From the beginning of 2002 through 2017, about the period of time covered by the DHS/DOJ report, the chance of being murdered in a terrorist attack committed by a native-born American on U.S. soil was about one in 40.6 million per year. During the same period, the chance of being murdered by a foreign-born terrorist was about 145 million per year. The total chance was about one in 32 million a year. To put that one in 32 million a year chance in perspective, the annual chance of being murdered in a non-terrorist homicide was about one in 19,325 per year or about 1,641 times as great as being killed in any terrorist attack since 9/11. These numbers are based on updated and expanded data that we plan on publishing in the near future (available upon request).

The DHS/DOJ report found that at least 549 people were convicted of international terrorism-related charges in federal court from 9/11 to the end of 2016. These are fewer than the 627 convictions that the DOJ reported through the end of 2015. What accounts for the 78 fewer convictions over a longer period? The DHS/DOJ report does not attempt to reconcile their report here with what they have reported previously. Furthermore, the DHS/DOJ report does not supply the relevant information about the numbers of convictions for terrorism-related offenses, their names, or the actual offenses they committed. The DHS/DOJ report should have published this information just as the government has done in the past in request to FOIAs.

The DHS/DOJ relies on “terrorism-related convictions” as their important metric, a definition that encompasses numerous convictions that have nothing to do with terrorism. There is no definition of “terrorism-related” as a crime in U.S. statutes. The phrase “terrorism-related” appears mostly in reference to actions of government officials in response to terrorism such as a “terrorism-related travel advisory.” The anti-terrorism Information Sharing Environment, which integrates information which the GAO, defines “terrorism-related” as relating to “terrorism, homeland security, and law enforcement, as well as other information.” That is a definition that so broad “terrorism-related” is not synonymous with “terrorism.” 

The DHS/DOJ report reveals that the DHS had 2,554 encounters with individuals on the terrorist watch list via the FBI’s Terrorists Screening Database (TSDB) in FY 2017. That means that DHS could have had multiple encounters with the same individuals who were all counted as separate “encounters.” The TSDB includes the identities of hundreds of thousands of known and suspected terrorists who are both native-born Americans, foreign-born travelers and immigrants to the United States, and foreigners who have not traveled here. According to a DOJ audit of the TSDB, frontline officers conducted about 270 million checks against the TSDB every month in 2007 with a total of about 3.24 billion checks per year. Assuming those numbers were unchanged for FY 2017, even though that number has likely increased, and that only 10 percent of them were conducted by DHS, means that about 0.0008 percent of all TSDB checks conducted by DHS resulted in a TSDB hit, or about one for about every 127,000 checks. That does sound dangerous until you realize that people flagged by the TSDB are not necessarily terrorists. Even U.S. Senators and Congressmen have been included on the TSDB list. Getting one’s name on the TSDB list is easy but getting off is very difficult. As the DOJ audit of the TSDB noted: “[O]ur file review found that the State Department and the DHS’s Customs and Border Protection did not revise encounter records in a screening database in a timely fashion to reflect modified or removed terrorist identities.”

Thus, the DHS/DOJ reported TSDB encounters statistic is virtually meaningless. It’s a count of people the government is concerned about without evidence or a clear way of being removed. The DHS/DOJ report could have told us how many of these folks actually committed a terrorist attack, eventually did so over time, or were arrested for a terrorism offense but they missed that opportunity. 

The DHS/DOJ report on international terrorism reveals little new information on the international terrorist threat to Americans on U.S. soil. Unusual for a government report on terrorism, it isn’t even capable of providing many scary-sounding statistics that could frighten people. While that last point is an improvement, future reports on this topic should seek to provide information on this important topic that isn’t publicly known. This report fails to do that.

Alex Nowrasteh is an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity. This article was originally posted to the Cato Institute website.