Domestic terrorismU.S. Government, Statutes, Terminology Not Prepared for Growing Threat of Domestic Terrorism: NCTC-led Panel

The National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), together with FBI and DHS, held a conference from 23 to 24 September 2019 to examine the U.S. government’s approach to confronting the threat of domestic terrorism (DT) and to inform future DT policy. The conference convened stakeholders from academia, the private sector, and across the federal government, including intelligence and Non-Title 50 agencies, to explore four themes: Terminology, Authorities, Operations, and Expanding Partnerships. In January this year, the NCTC issued a report based on the conference, intended to capture the content of the conversations held at the conference.

NCTC notes that the report does not represent the views of any particular department, agency, panelist, or participant.

Key Takeaways
The following themes emerged from all four sessions:

· Although the threat from DT is not new, radicalization and communication of DT actors has evolved in recent years and remains potent.

· Because an increasingly larger part of the activity related to DT occurs online and is constitutionally protected, increased collaboration among partners—including academia, NGOs, and state, local, and federal law enforcement—will help combat this evolving threat.

· Most conference participants agreed that current federal criminal statutes do not include a distinct law criminalizing acts of DT, leaving prosecutors to rely on existing criminal statutes to address DT-related offenses, indicating a need for legislative review.

· Most conference participants agreed that a domestic terrorist organization designation, similar to the current process for designating foreign terrorist organizations, could be useful in combating DT; however, DT actors in the Homeland and abroad are aware of the activities that merit designation and adjust accordingly to avoid prosecution.

· Noting the legal challenges to enacting a domestic terrorist organization designation, there was support for using the foreign terrorist designation process to proscribe DT analogues overseas.

· Legal mechanisms available to some foreign partners, e.g., to ban DT groups, are at odds with U.S. civil liberties. Creating a DT designation in the United States could be perceived as government overreach and/or unconstitutional.

· Conference participants noted the significance of the role of terminology in DT, as definitions laid out in statute are used to determine the allocation of tools and resources to departments and agencies. Using terminology solely derived from authorities can be restrictive, proscribing which departments/agencies participate in DT efforts, and lacks the flexibility to be useful for all US Government DT efforts. This impacts how the U.S. Government responds to DT threats, requiring changes in existing practices among the interagency.

· There is no whole-of-government DT threat picture, largely because the U.S. government does not have a common terminology to describe the threat. The absence of a common understanding of how threat departments/agencies prioritize DT issues differently results in a lack of analytic research and production on DT threats, and in turn reinforces the lack of policymaker prioritization.