Welcome to the Washington Institute for near east policy. I have the pleasure of directing the institutes rinehart pergamon counterterrorism intelligence and i am very pleased to be joined here today by the acting director of the National Counterterrorism center, russell travis. Todays conversation is part of the ongoing counterterrorism lecture series. Russell took office as the acting director in august but its not his first, second or third time in the building. He told many other leadership positions in ctc including a director at the office of Data Strategy and innovation, chief data officer among others. Hes held positions at the office for Defense Intelligence agencies, National Security council, the u. S. Army, joint chiefs of staff so we are very thrilled that he has been able to carve time out of his busy schedule and spend some time with us today to talk about counterterrorism in the era of competing priorities. One russell will deliver some remarks from the podium and then we will sit down for a fireside chat. I will ask the first few questions and then i will open up to all of you here attending in person to ask questions and we welcome all of you who are watching via a live strea the ar cspan thank you for joining us today. Russell, the podium is yours. Thank you very much. Its a great pleasure to be here among a number of old friends to talk about counterterrorism in the era of computing resources. I happened to testify earlier hr this week with the leadership of the fbi and dhs and talked with a friend of mine yesterday and she said a colleague of hers had seen the testimony and characterized my performance as that of a thoughtful nerd so i hope to aspire to something more this afternoon. Kidding aside, the issue of competing priorities is extraordinarily important. We are now almost two decades past 9 11 and if we continue to succeed protecting against largescale attacks against the homeland, i think the notion of competing priorities will do nothing but get more challenging as it should. Ever since former secretary issued the National Defense strategy last year, theres been athere hasbeen an ongoing implit discussion about risk. How does the threat of trigger for some stack up relative to those posed by great powers in north korea or iran or syria or lots of other threats. The testimony this week was along with terrorism is a layout different kinds of threats come election security, election security, counterintelligence, intellectual property theft, International Crime that kills more americans than terrorism ever well and as i said at the hearing it is completely understandable terrorism may no longer be viewed as the number one threat to the country but i dont know what that means and it begs a host of questions. What does the National Risk equation look like as the country conference a complex interNational Security environment. Second hell do we optimize the resources in the best interest of the country when the departments and agencies may have different priorities and if we reduce the efforts against terrorism hell do we do so in a matter that doesnt reverse some of the gains of the past 18 years. But id like to do the next 35 minutes or so is walking through a bit of a roadmap for the issues that need to be considered as we address the questions. Im going to develop ten new themes and in doing so snarky with the geostrategic and worked on to the electron level and back up again. So, number one, good news. Let me say at the outset, terrorism is not and never has been an existential threat to the country unless it changes who we are. This hold up ththose hold up thr killing a large number of people and as history has shown it can occupy the countrys attention for a very long time and prevent other important things from getting done. Fortunately, we have made a lot of progress on this front. The last significant al qaeda directed attack was five years ago today the last centrally directed oasis attack the turkish nightclub three years ago and before that, paris and brussels. Violent extremist attacks are down. Down. They won last yeathe one last yy half a dozen in europe both numbers are substantially lower than previous years. Capabilities o of them floatingf the nicest struggle to sustain success for libya where the franchise isnt doing very well. None of it is by accident. Theres been tremendous military and intelligence efforts in iraq and syria to eliminate the socalled caliphate many skilled operatives have been captured and killed and many secondorder effects. Theres less sophisticated messaging, squabbling and its not just iraq and syria. Weve moved around the globe. Dhs and state pushed for herself and made the homeland much less hospitable to terrorists. Weve also seen global efforts to improve Border Security particularly after paris and brussels. Weve seen in cyberspace less hospitable and services around the globe are working together against terrorism unlike the efforts against any other National Security discipline. The u. S. Continues to pass on Lessons Learned for interested parties with an exercise program of information sharing and cooperation and we are seeing Capacity Building in other countries. And other countries. Improvements and interservice cooperation and enhancements in information sharing to mitigate the impact of terrorist attacks. You compare the response of these attacks against the west eight and 2013 and the hotel earlier this year. Fullstop with far faster with fewer casualties. We will never eliminate terrorism a tremendous amount os amount of good work has been done and allows for the conversation of the comparative risks. And that brings me to seem number two that is a concern of the potential for complacency. We do need to be careful. When i started working after 9 11 we were overwhelmingly focused on al qaeda and one piece of real estate along the border. 18 years later we see the diverse threats that has been homegrown violent extremism. The afghan insurgency and command structure that maintains cohesion over 20 branches of networks. We have al qaeda that has received less attention the past few years and it also retains command structure and half a dozen affiliates. We see coordination among its affiliates and has a full range of threats has provided the iranian code to force also a growing concern for the militant groups in iraq. At the various strands, one complicated enough whe that youe also seeing a global threat of particularly extreme rightwing terrorism. More on that later. Terrorists around the globe are proving capable of exploiting technology. They are good at it and innovative. The use of communications for planning, social media to spread propaganda and transfer knowledge between and among individuals and networks, drones for a tax, delivery means and even assassination attempts. Highquality fraudulent travel documents that undermined screening and watchlist systems in front and Border Security. Crypto currencies to Fund Operations and potential terrorist use of chemical and biological weapons has moved from the low probability eventuality to something that is considered much more likely. In many cases the exploitation of technology has outpaced the associated legal and policy framework to deal with the threat. Looking out for five years we are particularly concerned with the growing adverse impact encryption will have on the terrorism efforts and is the key point. We cannot freeze our thinking and 2019. In 2019. We always need to be looking to the future. Finally come both al qaeda and isis have shown themselves to be successful at radicalizing the vulnerable populations around the globe. Sometimes they dissuade adversaries to establish and organize a group. Sometimes an adversary is deployed to aid in an existing group. Sometimes its already present with historic ties or personal connections. Sometimes it is done remotely with social media or letters and sometimes deployed to an isis court. They are innovative and bolstering the ranks. Things need to do need to focus on prevention. By any objective standard there are far more radicalized people now than there were at 9 11. Think tanks think were looking at four times the number and the number of terrorists has grown by a factor of almost 20. Unless you believe it was and they burn itself out, we will be faced with a growing radicalization problem around the globe no factor captures this worldwide. We believe a mix of personal, group, community, social, political and ideological factors contribute to recruit and to the organizations in mobilization to violence. We are gradually as a world accumulating more Empirical Data for instance the United NationsDevelopment Program evaluated 718 active reform extremists mostly from alshabaab or boca hung on to identify the reasons individuals are radicalized and recruit into these organizations act to person level. The most important factor cited with Human Rights Violations by the Government Security forces but also poverty, the nature of religious education, stable families and government corruption but its not about poverty and being downtrodden. As we said in sri lanka the individuals are well educated and well off but radicalized by heat features. There is a great deal of Fertile Ground in countries and we are facing the radicalization in prisons and even among Young Children being targeted by extremist propaganda. There are various initiatives with the radicalization, reintegration, offramp in as well as broader programs to focus on good governance, Economic Development and human rights available resources remain a problem. If the numbers of radicalized people around the globe keeps growing i just do not like the odds of identifying the right people to capture, kill and keep out of the country and there are second and Third Order Effects as the situation gets worse in africa and Climate Change takes its toll we are seeing greater migration into europe in turn is exacerbating tensions getting further rightwing violence to protest if violation is a vicious cycle which brings me to team member for the need to focus on identity, people of concern. Threats revolver from people and networks and while tracking identities is pretty arcane not as interesting as talking about the future of isis or the latest strike, it is incredibly important. They work underpinning much of the screening and fitting architecture that evaluates 3. 2 Million People a day and this is where we failed the country on 9 11. Two of the hijackers were allowed to get a visa, live in the country and eventually get on airplanes because we were insufficiently stitched together. An enormous amount of effort has been expended over the past eight years. We have effectively pushed workers out creating a multilayered defense to identify those with the rest connections at the earliest possible point and weve continually improved building dossiers, making better use of technologies, performing near realtime classified screening for the watchlist sent a where possible, making use of biometrics. This will never be a riskfree proposition, but the system has overall performed extraordinarily well. And ctc working with our partners is responsible for compiling u. S. Government database of known and suspected terrorists and the data is used to support screening partners. There has been some confusion on this point and when we talk about the precision its very important. Each da paid approximately three individuals that meet the definitions the country to come to the country. This is not to say they intend to conduct an attack but that there is information that warrants a scrutiny. Upwards of another southern watchlist of individuals each day may have connections at wheelock individual derogatory information required to consider them known or suspected terrorists. When 3 Million People per day are screened, drawing conclusions about any one particular individual can be fraught with challenges over the course of 16 years the system has through the test of time in some cases refugee refugees fore scrapings are provided we have no indication terrorist groups have exploited the program and screening limit the ability to do so. Over the past two decades thereve been two individuals who arrived as refugees and have not been attacks on the homeland both radicalized after coming to the United States. As effective as we are we cannot rest on our laurels. There are warning signs as we saw in the case of the terrorist attacks many of the individuals were known to security services. But they have highquality passports and id cards. By a graphicallbuy a graphicalls are on the wrong side of history. We saw this in Northern Syria where the captured fighters routinely gave fake name pence the fbi and Defense Department have as many people as they could. We also have ever increasing amounts of information. How do we process is to ensure highquality databases, i will get into that in a few minutes. In my opinion we should treat this much like we did that after 9 11. What do w we try to accomplish d how are we going to get there . We have a lot of piece parts and we need to ensure that they are properly stitched together. The vision should be a mere realtime screening against all available u. S. Government information to determine if an individual is a known or suspected terrorist. This would involve the collection of integration and sharing of biometrics. The benefits would extend well beyond counterterrorism and support screening against other categories of threats. That brings me to number five, the need for the robust intelligence none of this happens unless we maintain a robust integrated intelligence capability. There is no question the counterterrorism enterprise is the best integrated for the community. We have been doing as a community for a very long time but as good as we are in as well resourced, there will be challenges Going Forward. The globally dispersed terrorism threat that involves individuals and networks places a great pressure on the intelligence services. We need to evaluate the threat at multiple levels and have sufficient insight to determine if and when they pose a threat. The first is to provide by this sri lanka problem this was simply not a high priority before last easter. The Islamist Group denounced isis and 2016 and at a much wantemuchlonger because smallery that was apparently responsible. It had been a bit of a fringe element separatelelements progrr attacks on the buddhist statutes. Not obviously associated with isis we didnt recognize the threat. One step up from that with the local indigenous islamic insurgencies around the globe was to affiliate themselves with isis and with that comes greater interest in attacking the interests. Consider the longstanding insurgency in northern mozambique where we recently be affiliated with isis and are now focused on attacks on u. S. Energy interests. Extrapolate that. And one level higher we need to have sufficient insight into these insurgencies to proces asf and when they may be expanding beyond the country, local threat to one that may threaten the homeland this has been a challenge in the past. In 2009 we thought of a q. A p. As a regional threat. Christmas day of 2009 there was an attempt to blow up the fight over detroit and in 2010 we viewed the Pakistani Taliban as a regionallybased south asia threat and yet they trained the bombing in the New York Times square. Think about the people in the networks and the ability to exploit technology and we had more than a few challenges. At the macro level as we adjust to the other threats, there is no question that intelligence resources, collection and analytic will be shifted away from terrorism to other priorities. Actions have consequences. What do we start focusing on, what is the associated risk . As we drawdown military forces we will have less intelligence capable. There will be less liaison with underground partners. Those are simply facts. With that comes a degree of risk when we determine how great the risk is. Compensated for and so forth. And then at the national level, we are sure we have the right constellation of organizations and authorities. And that brings me t to be numbr seven, the need to get the electrons right. If we are going to get the intelligence right, we need to get the electrons right. Data is everything whether we are looking for strategic trends or conducting tactical Level Analysis associated with individuals and networks its the lifeblood of the community. Its extraordinarily complex particularly when we are dealing with information that is invariably incomplete generally ambiguous and often wrong. Ten years ago this month the nigerian father walked into the embassy said his son may be associated with extremists in yemen. That was a capable to every analyst in the government. It got no attention. Other data existed but the relationships were obvious. I spent my entire career and will state counterterrorism has the worst ratio of any discipline which ive ever been associated. I think th think that he wishesn analyst working counterterrorism since 9 11, he or she has seen a quarter of a million threat. Overwhelmingly they were bogus but when they come in, how exactly do you know . To be a little more concrete we average about three druid abroad a threeyear, almost one and a. To get a little more concrete, the Center Receives in excess of 10,000 terrorism related intelligence reports today that they have to sift through and of those 10,000 reports contained 16,000 names daily. All our services are challenged to uncover potential threats. With the growth of captured media on the battlefield or the explosion of social media, the magnitude of the problem only grows. Terrorists to communicate. But these ar