Terrorism actually presents . Another quick thing about what the book presents we have it for sale and is priced to sell here at the cato institute. 18 with a spine hardcover book. You are, quite certain you will not find it for lesson on top of that the office assured me they would be happy to sign it for you so those of you who are here with us today are very fortunate. Those of you who are watching on line at home ill bet you wish you were here but rest assured you will be able to find a book and other fine retail establishments on line etc. , etc. , etc. Let me welcome john and mark. Im going to deduce them in the order they will speak. John mueller is a Senior Research scientist and a member of the Political Science department at Ohio State University and is also my colleague and senior fellow at cato. He is the author of numerous books. I will mention only a few including overblown, atomic of session, war of ideas coming retreat from doomsday the obsolescence of war, war president s of Public Opinion, the remnants of war and with mark stewart, terror, security and money please member the American Academy of arts and sciences and has been a John Simon Guggenheim fellow. Mark stewart is a professor of Civil Engineering at the director of the center for performance and reliability at the university of newcastle in australia and also in australian professorial fellow. He again coauthored with john the book terror security money and is written more than 300 technical papers and reports in his career. His current work focuses on the quantification of security risks and the costeffectiveness of Aviation Security other Counterterrorism Measures. He also leads a consortium of five universities in australia for the commonwealth, scientific and Industrial Research organizations flagship cluster fund project, Climate Adaptation engineering for extreme events events. Without limit turn it over to my colleague john mueller. Thank you. Thanks very much for coming out. Its not totally common for political scientist to coopt their books with engineers and you might interested in how that happened. When my first book on terrorism came out call overblown in 2006 i managed to get on the jon stewart show and they wanted me on halloween because we were going to talk about fear and so forth. Mark stewart with his wife were visiting. They were both engineers and mark emailed me saying we ought to get together. We got together over a cup of coffee. He started talking about breaking even analysis which he will talk about now and i will bet which is basically terrorism and the only way to deal with it in an efficient way is not simply to say, trying to figure out the what the probability of a terrorist attack but rather how many terrorist attacks on the security measure passed to prevent in order to justify its expense hence the cost benefit analysis sort of thing. At any rate we embarked on a career writing a whole bunch of stuff and published about 20 peerreviewed articles in the area and dozens of offense. We got one into playboy. We were not on the centerfold and markets. Proud of that area he tells all of his engineering publication so its been a very productive occasion. In 2011 with published the first book together which is terror, security and money in which we analyzed the standard cost benefit analyses, mostly protection of infrastructure including for example the Office Buildings protecting Office Buildings from terrorist attacks doesnt make a whole lot of sense unless the likelihood of an attack against it over and is a thousand times higher than it is at present rate and the current book is focused on policing of terrorism and between the two they take up about 90 of expenditures on Homeland Security, domestic Homeland Security within the united United States. Let me talk a little bit about that and set it in context. As chris pointed out there has been a prodigious increase on spending on policing since 9 11. The fbis budget counterterrorism budget went from Something Like 11 billion to 3 billion is continuing. There was an effort overall to try to find terrorists and after 9 11 the thought was they must be everywhere and they must be extremely sophisticated so as early as 2002 the intelligence people were telling reporters that they believed there were between two and 5000 al qaeda operatives operating within the United States. After longer period of time we look back at that and indicates probably the total number was probably closer to three or seven. In other words they were seeing an awful lot of those. Also very impressive has been the fact that under the direction of Robert Mueller the director of the fbi at that time the order went out basically to follow every tip, every lead that comes in and they established a thing called the threat matrix which is simply a table of tips that have come in. Our calculations are, i touch on in the book actually be fbi has followed up over 10 million leads since 9 11 which at most a thousand have been very productive and even lead to real terrorism, the ones that are basically pretty trivial. Peter burgin has come out with a book recently who says basically they are not just chasing 5000 a day but chasing 10,000 threats a day so that means is that numbers corrected actually chase down Something Like 20 million leads up which only 1000 lead to much of anything at all, probably less than a thousand. Its a prodigious amount of effort in the question is is it worth it overall . Is the idea of going after every single tip and every lead very effective . And what we tried to do in this book is sort of assess how bad the terrorism threat is and how significant is it to the United States and how many terrorists are there and what is the likelihood they could create mayhem . Is mark will point out later break even analysis suggests that for the fbis expenditures on counterterrorism to be justified they would have to disrupt, foil, deter about one quite large attack like in times square every two months so the question is if thats the case is that reasonable to expect they might dunn . May be because of the fbi endeavor Government Agencies we are in better shape on that. What i would like to do is go through what terrorism has been in the United States. Its obviously been asked ordinarily limited in the sense of the amount of disrupt destruction that has taken place. Since 9 11 about three people per year have died at the hands of islamist terrorists. Thats extremely small number and the people who have died by lightning is 10 times higher that higher than that. The fbi and other policing agencies have been able to handle it. Let me look at various levels here. First of all there is disclosed terrorist of the of terrorists who have actually been caught in various kinds of plots over this period. Ive done a casebook which is a vendor pages. Its a web book on line with a case study done by owner students at ohio state and its really quite good i have to say. Each of these cases of 60 or 70 individual cases which have come to light either the terrorist has perpetrated them or they have been disrupted and brought to court during this period of time. When you look overall at these cases, they are really pretty unimpressive. There are a few that might have led to something but for the most part what happens is the fbi gets wind of the plot that has put into force and has been able to disrupted mostly by inserting an informant into the plot itself and the informant is not just looking but actually pretends to be a fellow terrorists. For example a guy in baltimore a few years ago decided he wanted to be a jihadists. They started advertising on facebook for fellow jihadists. This is not at all unusual and he got three responses. The First Response told him stuff it. The second response was trying to argue out of it and a third was was from an fbi operative who said wow ive always wanted to do terrorism myself. Need some help. It does happen to have this car bomb in my garage and i need help setting it off. So they got together and so forth and eventually the guy was arrested. Thats really very typical and what you get in this is its not so much they are working on innocence but working on people who are predisposed to do something. They are really angry about stuff but they seem to be amazingly incompetent overall. So consequently the idea that they could get together on a coherent plot when you look into these cases is very questionable. Some cases the guy in baltimore probably wouldnt have gotten around to doing much of anything and if he did something he would most likely be killed himself. If you look at these cases there are some that are pretty scary, pretty threatening at least and maybe they would have gotten their act together which is pretty questionable. You certainly wouldnt have one every two months by any means he the next case would be the socalled undisclosed cases and you contemplate get the notion that we cant tell you about everything, every plot we have disrupted. Thereve been a whole bunch of them, big ones that we disrupted that they didnt get to court and we disrupted them in a different way and we cant talk about it. I tried to trace back down in various ways and let me just give you unquote here, actually two quotes. One is from mark who has been in the middle of this for several years. He wrote important books about terrorism. He said is a member of the Intelligence Community he was kept abreast of all the plots United States and had not seen any significant terrorist plots that have been disrupted and not disclosed. On the contrary the government goes out of its way to take credit for nonplots such as their sting operations. I also checked with glenn carl who is a National Intelligence officer for transnational threats at the cia for many years. I asked him about the reports, the undisclosed report and since we are on cspan we have to be careful here but his response was three words, six words, two words are pitted, three times. The first one begins with b and the other one begins with axe. So it is seems that thats very unlikely. The next step is how about people who have been disrupted referred to as the al capone kind of thing. In other words there are people ive talked the talk. The fbi has found out about it but they havent gotten into a conspiracy. They havent moved towards doing something but the talk is dangerous sounding. And you cant get them for simply saying jihadist type stuff. What has happened and probably 100, 200 or maybe more cases as these people ive been disrupted by resting them and predicting them on different charges. I was just at a performance last night of 1984 and there is the phrase about the thought crimes. This comes pretty close because they have spoken of course about possibly committing a crime but thats all they have done. And then they get prosecuted because of that. Their whole record is looked at to see if theres something they can be put in jail for. In other words if you look at these guys, in some respects that triggered this look at the immigrants its almost impossible to enter this country without lying in some respects on misidentifying something on your papers. If you are an american citizen these guys frequently have done things which can be jenna milly putting in jail for, running drugs or forgery of Something Like that. There are a bunch of these plots but the question is the these plots are even more embryonic than the disclosed plots. If they had been less embryonic they would if tried on direct terrorism charges and they basically havent been. So its hard to see a whole lot of these would have ever gone without the fbi and other policing agencies going to the fullbore thing. The next case would be about the turning attacks. Surely the intelligence apparatus and for that matter the whole Security Apparatus has deterred terrorists from attacking in the United States because it would be very difficult. Im inclined to agree that would be very much the case, very much the case that there are certain targets which are definitely very much unlikely to be attacked. For example trying to hijack an airliner is incredibly difficult ive done a lot of studies on that. The successes are well under 1 with all the security barriers there including policing ones and another place, another popular target that is offlimits are military bases. Many of the targets, many of the terrorists want to attack military bases because unlike much what you hear about radicalization and so forth as farce these cases are concerned the chief thing that causes them to radicalize is hostility to american policy. Its not hostility to democracy. Its not to create caliphates or sharia law. To give you an example you may remember the Boston Marathon bomber who was hit on the boats and play with their bleeding he wrote out a certain manifesto. This is totally typical with this furby is coming out of a wouldbe terrorists. Our actions came with a message he said radios government is killing our innocent civilians it did as a muslim i cant stand to see such evil go unpunished. You heard one of us and you heard us all. We are beginning to rise up. Basically hostility to American Foreign policy in the middle east both military and political so therefore an attack on i military base would be terrific so and very hard to do so they focus on easy targets which are basically recruiting stations and so forth. The problem with this if you are dedicated jihadist and you cant bring down an airliner and you say okay im not going to do anything there is not tell you and other possible targets. The jihadist says i want to take down an airliner, i cant take down an airliner so not going to be a jihadist as opposed on number of targets they could attack with alms or bullets for instance in san bernardino. They are deflated by the fact that they can get their Gold Standard terrorist targets but continued to keep doing this is very questionable. The idea that deterrence is very effective. Finally theres the notion that well we havent found, these terrorists, we have only caught the stupid terrorists and the smart ones are still out there. Well if thats the case why dont they do something . The longer they wait the more likely they are going to be attacked and be found out raid the idea that only the ones have been caught in the smart ones are still out there if they are smart they would be trying to do something and they simply havent done it. The overall effect is basically the amount of threat disclosed and undisclosed is really quite limited areas i only have a minute or two left and what i would like to do is just a quick thing out of the book about Public Opinion on terrorism and come back and explain later. We have done quite a bit of looking at the trends and Public Opinion lebanon there are mostly , they are just about all flat since the end of 2001. If is it likely and may or may not be killed by a terrorist . To think the United States is winning the war on terrorism and so forth . They bounce around with events but basically there are flat all the way through which is really impressive because you think there would be some erosion over this period of time basically as far as i can see there hasnt then. This is before i says added on. You have a long period of time with no big attacks to speak of. Osama bin laden has been captured and still there havent been any erosions. The conclusion on this, there are various things on it but the final one is essentially one of the problems is this kind of terrorism, not all terrorism, this kind of terrorism has a spooky foreign reference namely islam and the middle east. There is no center to it and somewhat similar to fears about domestic connison who have an ideology of some sort or more associated with international, spooky international movement. Even though very little happened but economists concerned about them and their danger to National Security was very high. The other comparison and did not basically decline either the other comparison is the witchhunts an era. The alternate spookiness of course is th devil. At one time they became, many people said which is existed among us which were doing all kinds of diabolical things. Over period of time tens of thousands of which is, mostly women, were executed in europe. Eventually that did fade away but it took 200 years so thats a really lemmy conclusion for my talk right now. Okay, thanks for your attention. [applause] i wish to thank chris and caroline for inviting us today. As chris mentioned im an engineer so im very comfortable and if we are going to talk about risk we need to speak about how do we kant if i and compare that to others and thats a congressional basis for decisionmaking. As an engineer i like equations and john doesnt like equations at all so we compromised. So the book has one equation im working on john to get to cope. Two. How do we measure security outcomes and how do we measure the benefits . Theres a lot of information about how much screening measures cost and what we dont see is how much, how money lives had they stayed . Its worth spending a large amount of money if you believe it works so the modeling system of counterterrorism is away to find evidence. All smiley face its really about how do the cost compared to the benefits, what are the tradeoffs that we are prepared to accept . 15 years after 9 11 maybe its time to recalibrate in our response to those events and what we are doing now. So the key issue that comes up time and time again is riskaverse. The budget and spending up of land and the uks clearly say any new regulations must satisfy costbenefit considerations cost benefits and if you do that you must use expected values which real