If you were an ISIS operative in Raqqa plotting to launch a terrorist attack in the United States, and you proposed to your bosses to use the U.S. immigration system to infiltrate terrorists into the United States, they would summarily execute you for rank incompetence. Use the U.S. immigration system, with all its vetting and with a waiting time measure in years (if you are accepted!) to launch a terrorist operation? Any competent terrorist would choose the Visa Waiver Program (VWP) to enter the United States: There are enough ISIS followers in the thirty-eight VWP countries, and using the VWP is not only quicker: It is a sure thing. You will make it into the United States in hours or days, and without a hassle — not years, as is the case with the immigration route (for which a typical young would-be terrorist may not be eligible in any event).

On Friday President Donald Trump imposed a travel ban to the United States of citizens from seven Muslim countries —- Syria, Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen. Security experts note that citizens of these seven countries have so far never been implicated in mass killings in the United States. The major terrorist groups that have attacked the United States and other Western countries — al Qaeda, the Taliban, and ISIS — trace their roots to other Sunni such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Qatar.

Despite concerted efforts by many people and institutions, fundamental aspects of terrorism — identifying participants, understanding how they radicalize, and developing effective countermeasures — remain unclear. In a new Science article four experts from different fields propose a strategy for terrorism research.

Field research, especially on the ground with youths engaged in violent extremism or susceptible to it, is needed to inform machine learning in mining vast amounts of field data that could improve an understanding of the terrorist threat of groups, such as Islamic State and Al Qaeda, suggests a new research paper.

At least 32 Jewish Community Centers across the United States were subjected to bomb threats on Wednesday, less than ten days after sixteen more JCCs were evacuated after similar threats. JCCs and other Jewish institutions were targeted in the Boston, Miami, Detroit, Cincinnati, Nashville, Minneapolis, and Orlando metro areas, among others. The Anti-Defamation League says that anti-Semitic incidents have spiked since the presidential election.

The U.K. highest court has ruled that former foreign secretary Jack Straw, MI6, and the U.K. government must stand trial for their participation in the 2004 kidnapping of a Libyan dissident and his wife. The unanimous ruling by the seven justices said that the rendition and torture of Abdel Hakim Belhaj breached rights enshrined in the Magna Carta, and should be put before an English court.

If there’s one thing Americans can agree upon, it might be that people – no matter how angry they are – shouldn’t be indiscriminately firing guns into crowds. Yet mass shootings are on the rise, with the shooting at the Fort Lauderdale airport just the latest example. I’m fearful that what we’re seeing isn’t just an increase in violence, but the normalization of a habit, a new behavior recognized as a way to express an objection to the way things are. That is, I’m afraid that mass murder may be becoming – to the horror of almost all of us, but to the liking of a violent few – a form of protest. The terrifying part is that once protest tools become part of the repertoire, they are diffused across movements and throughout society. Perhaps that’s why we see such a range of motivations among these mass murderers. It has become an obvious way to express an objection, and the discontented know they can get their point across.

An inquest into the shooting rampage in Tunisia that killed thirty Britons and other victims, was told that Tunisian security forces deliberately slowed down responding to the terrorist attack on holidaymakers in a beach hotel. A local investigation in Tunisia criticized the police for stalling on purpose as they made their way to the scene of the killings.

The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) has released its latest data tool, the Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States (PIRUS) dataset. PIRUS is a cross-sectional, quantitative dataset of individuals in the United States who radicalized to the point of violent or non-violent ideologically motivated criminal activity, or ideologically motivated association with a foreign or domestic extremist organization from 1948 until 2013.