PerspectivePost-9/11 Intel Center Now Going After Domestic Terror

As white supremacist violence surges, a major hub for American intelligence has quietly expanded its focus on domestic terrorism, according to a senior U.S. counterterrorism official who spoke with The Daily Beast. It’s a small shift that draws accolades from veteran national-security officials. The shift also concerns civil-liberties advocates, who say it may point to an erosion of the boundary between law enforcement and America’s spies. 

Betsy Woodruff writes in the Daily Beast that the Bush administration stood up the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as a clearinghouse for all intelligence except, as the Center has put it, that “pertaining exclusively to domestic terrorism.” 

The NCTC employs approximately 1,000 people and federal law requires that it act as the government’s “knowledge bank” on known or suspected terrorists. For example, it keeps a massive database that serves as the basis of the TSA’s “no-fly” terrorist watchlist. 

n early 2018, the official said, the head of the NCTC directed lawyers from the intelligence community to revisit its understanding of the law that governs it. A Democratic official on the House Intelligence Committee said Congress urged the Center to conduct the analysis—and fast. 

By the summer of 2018, the lawyers concluded that NCTC could use its considerable resources to analyze purely domestic threats, as long as it did so to help the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). NCTC officials shared that view with senior officials in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that oversees the NCTC, and they didn’t get any pushback, per the official. Then the battleship started to turn—just a tad.