• DHS’s New Counterterrorism Strategy Calls Out White Supremacism, but Will Need Resources and Support

    Acting U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kevin McAleenan unveiled on September 20 the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) “Strategic Framework for Countering Terrorism and Targeted Violence.” For the first time, a formal Trump administration departmental strategy explicitly calls out white supremacism as “one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism.” In most other respects, the strategic framework did not break new ground. DHS’s real challenge will be whether its new counterterrorism (CT) framework will get the resources and political support DHS needs from the White House and the Congress.

  • New Domestic Terrorism Laws Are Unnecessary for Fighting White Nationalists

    In the past, incidents of white nationalist violence haven’t garnered the attention they deserve from Congress or federal law enforcement. But after the August 2019 El Paso shooting by a young white supremacist, Reps. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Randy K. Weber Sr. (R-TX) introduced two separate bills that would create a new crime of domestic terrorism, citing lethal white nationalist crimes as the justification. Faiza Patel writes for the Brennan Center that while it’s reassuring, and long overdue, for members of Congress to take the threat of white nationalist violence seriously, such legislation is both unnecessary and creates serious risks of abuse.

  • Hacking Back May Be Less Risky than We Thought

    The United States has historically been wary of punching back in cyberspace, fearing that a digital conflict could rapidly escalate to rockets and bombs. But those concerns may be overblown. Two recent studies have found it’s extremely rare for nations to ratchet up a cyber conflict, let alone escalate it to a conventional military exchange, and that the U.S. public may put extra pressure on leaders not to let a cyber conflict get out of hand. But one of the studies did not find much evidence that hacking back does anything to make adversaries stop hacking you in the first place.

  • Islamic State 2.0 and the Information War

    In December 2018, US President Donald Trump declared victory over the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, tweeting that ‘ISIS is largely defeated and other local countries, including Turkey, should be able to easily take care of whatever remains. We’re coming home!’ And in the first three months of this year, Trump said or tweeted 16 times that IS was either completely defeated or soon would be. But the United States government appears to disagree. In August, the three lead inspectors general from the Department of Defense, the Department of State and the US Agency for International Development submitted a joint report to Congress reviewing Operation Inherent Resolve, the US campaign to defeat IS, over the period from 1 April through 30 June of this year. They concluded that, ‘Despite the loss of physical territory, thousands of ISIS fighters remain in Iraq and Syria and are carrying out attacks and working to rebuild their capabilities.’

  • White Supremacists Lead New Wave of Foreign Fighters: Report

    The Soufan Center released a new report which closely examines the transnational nature and operational dynamics of a wide range of white supremacy extremist (WSE) groups across the world. The report also draws on lessons learned from disrupting and combatting Salafi-jihadist groups like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, the tactics of which in some cases are being utilized by WSE groups.

  • A Meltdown in Nuclear Security

    A commando raid on a nuclear power plant seems the stuff of Hollywood. So why are nuclear security experts so worried? It ranks among the worst-case scenarios for a nuclear power plant: an all-out assault or stealth infiltration by well-trained, heavily armed attackers bent on triggering a nuclear blast, sparking a nuclear meltdown or stealing radioactive material. Under pressure from a cash-strapped nuclear energy industry increasingly eager to slash costs, the commission in a little-noticed vote in October 2018 halved the number of force-on-force exercises conducted at each plant every cycle. Four months later, it announced it would overhaul how the exercises are evaluated to ensure that no plant would ever receive more than the mildest rebuke from regulators – even when the commandos set off a simulated nuclear disaster that, if real, would render vast swaths of the U.S. uninhabitable. Nuclear security experts, consultants, law enforcement veterans and former NRC commissioners are nothing short of alarmed. “You can’t afford to be wrong once,” says one expert.

  • White Supremacy Has Triggered a Terrorism Panic

    Our collective response to terrorism seems to swing on a pendulum between rank complacency and terrified myth-making. In January 2014, U.S. President Barack Obama dismissed the Islamic State as al Qaeda’s “JV team.” But by September of that year, after the group had captured Mosul in Iraq and launched a genocidal campaign of slaughter against the Yazidis, he started bombing it. A similar dynamic can be observed in the case of white supremacy today. This is not “to suggest that the threat of white supremacy is not real or that we should be complacent about it,” Simon Cottee writes. “Of course it is real, and of course we need to indict and seriously punish those who have committed or are plotting to commit terrorist atrocities in the name of white supremacy.” But we should resist the urge to treat white supremacy as “a mythical monster against which to signal our moral virtue”: “White supremacy is not a monolith endangering our children and societies, but we might just make it into one by overinflating it into precisely this.”

  • Stronger Response to Domestic Terror Needed: Expert

    To counter the rise of violent far-right terrorism in the U.S., the federal government should strengthen its partnerships with civilian researchers and embrace a public health approach for at-risk individuals, terrorism expert told a congressional committee.

  • Trump Is Giving Iran More Than It Ever Dreamed of

    For the past six months, there has been plenty of reason to believe that Iran has primarily been motivated by fear, even desperation, in its confrontation with the United States. Lately, however, there are signs that Tehran has shifted to a strategy driven instead by a sense of opportunity and advantage. Kenneth M. Pollack writes in Foreign Policy that the trigger for this shift has been the Trump administration, whose misguided approach to Iran is on the cusp of splitting the United States from its Sunni Arab allies—a monumental geostrategic victory that Tehran has sought for 40 years.

  • Europe's Extremists Try Recruiting from Police, Army: Europol

    Europol, the European police agency, issued a “Strategic Report” earlier Tuesday, saying that right-wing violence is on the rise in many EU states. The confidential report, cited by German media, says that the extremist groups seek to boost their “combat skills” by recruiting military and police members. The report noted that extremist groups are getting “increasingly popular among younger and better educated demographics.”

  • Russia “Adding Violent Energy” to White Supremacy Around the Globe, U.S. Experts Claim

    White supremacist terrorism around the globe is being manipulated by Russia for political ends, senior U.S. national security officials have warned. Such white supremacist groups are “emulating” jihadists like Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant by forging a “transnational” community of followers, using social media and encrypted communications platforms, the experts said. Joshua Geltzer, former U.S. senior director of counter terrorism, said: “The Russian government adds violent energy to the emerging transnational network of white supremacists, spreading its cause in part through disinformation aggressively disseminated online.” Ali Soufan, a former FBI supervisory special agent, told lawmakers that the “emerging epicenter” of white supremacist extremism is Russia and Ukraine. “There are extensive ties between the Russian government and far-right groups in Europe.”

  • Anthrax Redux: Did the Feds Nab the Wrong Guy?

    On 18 August 2008—after almost seven years, nearly 10,000 interviews, and millions of dollars spent developing a whole new form of microbial forensics—some of the FBI announced that it had concluded that Army biodefense researcher Bruce Ivins was the person responsible for the fall 2001 anthrax letter attacks. “It’s been 10 years since the deadliest biological terror attack in U.S. history launched a manhunt that ruined one scientist’s reputation and saw a second driven to suicide, yet nagging problems remain,” Noah Shachtman writes. “Problems that add up to an unsettling reality: Despite the FBI’s assurances, it’s not at all certain that the government could have ever convicted Ivins of a crime.”

  • Innocent Users Have the Most to Lose in the Rush to Address Extremist Speech Online

    Big online platforms tend to brag about their ability to filter out violent and extremist content at scale, but those same platforms refuse to provide even basic information about the substance of those removals. How do these platforms define terrorist content? What safeguards do they put in place to ensure that they don’t over-censor innocent people in the process? Again and again, social media companies are unable or unwilling to answer the questions. Facebook Head of Global Policy Management Monika Bickert claimed that more than 99 percent of terrorist content posted on Facebook is deleted by the platform’s automated tools, but the company has consistently failed to say how it determines what constitutes a terrorist⁠—or what types of speech constitute terrorist speech.

  • DHS: Domestic Terrorism, Particularly White-Supremacist Violence, As Big a Threat as ISIS, al-Qaeda

    Domestic terrorism and mass attacks are as great a threat to the United States today as foreign terrorism, the Department of Homeland Security said in a new strategy report unveiled Friday. The strategy recognizes that foreign terrorist groups continue to plot against the United States but notes there has been a disturbing rise in attacks motivated by domestic terrorist ideologies — and that white supremacy is one of the most potent drivers. “In our modern age, the continuation of racially based violent extremism, particularly violent white supremacy, is an abhorrent affront to the nation,” acting homeland security secretary Kevin McAleenan said in a speech Friday in Washington, saying the trend “has no place in the United States of America, and it never will.”

  • Does Norway Have a Far-Right Problem?

    A recent article in the Guardian by Sindre Bangstad, a Norwegian social anthropologist describes Norway as being in the grip of pervasive, far-right nationalism, with violence simmering just below the surface. “Norway is in denial about the threat of far-right violence,” reads the bombastic headline. Kathrine Jebsen Moore, a fellow Norwegian, writes that Bangstad misrepresents and misleads: she motes that the Norwegian Police Security Service still regards Islamist terror threats as the most serious threat to Norway, even if it has upgraded the threat of far-right extremism from “unlikely” to “possible” after an attempted mosque attack in August. But “to see in the upgrading of the terrorist threat posed by far-right groups a general mood of irrational hatred for immigrants and Muslims, and portray Norway as a hotbed for racism, is just wrong,” Moore writes, adding: “Norway, like other European countries, is faced with a new set of challenges as it changes from a homogenous nation to a country with a growing immigrant population” – and that “Norway is coping with this influx a lot better than Sweden. So, is Norway in denial about its far-right problem? Don’t believe it.”