Circuits really become sensitized, how this narrow circuits of groove. They down. That is what is key. The reality is, i may not tell you, but the reason this has been so hard because once those narrow circuits get straight and, how long do they last . So they can last a lifetime. But the good news is we can lay down new narrow circuits. I think that increasing they coming in now, those who provide care understand the goal is to try to lay down those circuits. Thank you very much. [applause] [inaudible] he will be staying to share file to either sign it cant be [inaudible] caught my [inaudible conversations] when i tune in to it on the weekend, sharing their releases. Watching ampersand the tv is the best television for serious readers. Cspan can have a longer conversation than delve into this subject. Booktv weekends bring your author after author after author with fascinating people. Of the booktv and in the cspan fan. Good afternoon, everyone get my name is christopher preble, Vice President for Foreign Policy is your cato institute. Thank you for being here today. A special shout out to our Conference Department for their hard work making cato event such a great success. I want to welcome those to be watching online at www. Cato. Org and also one cspan. Since 2001, the United States has created a restructured more than two counterterrorism organizations for every apprehensions apparently planning to commit terrorism within the country. Central to the massive enterprise are the efforts police and intelligence agencies to follow up on over 10 million tips, but the vast majority of which lead nowhere. In their new pope, chasing ghosts, john mueller and mark stewart try to answer a few rarely asked questions. Is the chase worth the effort, or is it excessive given the danger that terrorism actually present. Another great thing about the boat a busy attending today and the auditorium are very fortunate because we have it for sale and is priced to sell here at the cato institute. Eighteen dollars for this fine cover book. You are quite certain im quite certain you will not find a far less. On top of that, the authors have assured me they would be happy to sign it for you. Those of you here with us today are very fortunate. Those of you watching online at home, i bet you wish you were here. Rest assured you will find the book and other fine Retail Establishment online, et cetera, et cetera. Welcomed john and mark. I will introduce them in the order they will speak. John mueller is a Senior Research scientist at the marchant center and a member of the Political Science department at Ohio State University and is also my colleague, senior fellow here at cato. Hes the author of numerous books. I will mention only a few included overblown, atomic accession, warring ideas, retreat from doomsday, war president and Public Opinion, the remnants of war and with mark stuart, terror security and money. Hes a member of the American Academy of arts and sciences and has been a child and Simon Guggenheim fellow. Mark g stuart mark stewart director for an interim performance and reliability at the university of newcastle in australia and is also an australian professorial fellow. He again coauthored with the terror security money and is also the more than 300 technical papers and reports in his career his current work focuses on quantification of risks and the costeffectiveness of aviation Aviation Security and other measures. He also leads a consortium of five universities in australia for the commonwealth, scientific and industrial organizations, flagship cluster fun project, Climate Adaptation engineering for extreme events. With that, let me turn it over to my colleague, john mueller. Thanks very much for coming out. Its not totally common for political scientist and coauthor books with engineers. You might be interested in how that have been. When my first book on terrorism came out called overblown and 2006, i managed to get on the jon stewart show and they wanted me on halloween because we will talk about fear and so forth. Mark stuart along with his wife were visiting ohio state at that time. They are both engineers. Mark emailed me ive been working on something along that line. They started talking about raking in analysis and have a little bit. We do with it in a pretty efficient way. Its not simply to say to figure out what the probability of a terrorist attack is, but rather how many terrorist attacks of a security measure have to prevent an order to justify the expense as the cost both benefit them. At any rate, weve been in dark on a career writing a whole bunch of stuff up about 20 peerreviewed articles and the very dozens of outfits. We got wanted to playboy. You will be happy to learn that mark is very proud of that. So its been a very project education. In 2011, we published our first got together, which is terror security and money and which we analyzed the cost benefit analyses, mostly protection of infrastructure including, for example, that Office Building protecting Office Buildings as a terrorist attack doesnt make a lot of sense unless the likelihood is 1000 times higher than it is at present. 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 States. An attack about that insanity and contacts. As chris pointed out, theres out, theres been this propitious increases spending on policing since 9 11. The fbis budget, counterterrorism budget when something from 1 billion to 3 billion that is continuing. There was an effort overall to try to find terrorism after 9 11 at the thought was that must be everywhere and they must be extremely sophisticated so for example 2002 the intelligence people were telling reporters that they believe there is between two and 5000 al qaeda operatives operating within the United States after a longer period of time we can look back at that and indicate probably the total number was closer to three or seven. In other words, they were seen an awful lot of ghosts. Also very impressive has been the fact that under the direction of robert mueller, director of the fbi at that time, the order went out basically to follow up every tip, and relief that comes in and they established a threat matrix, which is simply a cable of tips that have come in. Our calculations are that our calculations in the boat is that the fbi has followed up about over 10 million laid since 9 11 it which at most a thousand have been good and even the productively so the two real terrorism is sort of fits basically pretty trivial. Peter bergen has come up with the book just recently in which he posts another counterterrorism official says basically they are not just chasing 5000 day. They are chasing 10,000 threats a day. That means if that number is correct, dave chased down 20 million lives of which only 1000 have been led to much of anything at all. Probably less than a thousand. Its a prodigious amount of effort. The question is it worth it overall. If the idea of going after every single tip, every of the very fact it. What we try to in the book is sort of a sense how bad the terrorism threat is, how significant it is to the United States. And what is the likelihood they could create mayhem. As mark will point out that there are breakeven analysis suggests that for the fbis expenditures on counterterrorism to be justified, they would have to disrupt, foil, deter about one quite large attack, and times square every two months. So the question is, if thats the case, is it reasonable to expect the might of done that. They havent done anything like that, but maybe the fbi and other Government Agencies were in better shape on that. Okay, what i would like to do is go through what terrorism has been in the United States. Its obviously been extra ordinary lives limited in the amount of destruction taken place since 9 11 about three people per year have died at the hands of islamist terrorists. Thats an extremely small number. A number of people died at the same time of lightning is wanted 10 times higher than that. The fbi and other agencies have been able to handle it. Let me look at various levels. First of all, there is a disclose terrorists. The number of terrorists who have been caught and various plots over this. Ive been accused the, 800 pages , a web of front nine with honors students by ohio state. On her students are quite good at ohio state. Each of these cases of 60 or 70 individual cases which have come to light have either perpetrated them or they have been disrupted and brought to court during this period of time. When you look overall at these cases, theyre really pretty unimpressive. Theres a few that might have led to some day, but for the most part, what happens is the fbi gets wind of it ought be put into a full wifi and 13 in a format into the plot itself. The informant is not just looking, but actually pretends to be a fellow terrorists. For example, one guy in baltimore a few years ago decided he wanted to be a jihadist insert advertising on facebook. Its not at all unusual. He got three responses. The first was on the they told them to stuff it. The second best response. I need some help. I have a car bomb in my garage, so they eventually got arrested. So that is really very typical. What you get in this is not so much that they are working on in a sense, but they are actually working on people who are predisposed. They are really angry about stuff. But they seem to be just amazingly incompetent overall. Consequently, the idea that they could get together a coherent plot and they look into each of these cases is very questionable. Another guy in baltimore probably wouldve never done much of anything. If he did something, the person was lucky to be killed within himself. If you look at these cases, there are some that are pretty scary, pretty threatening at least. Maybe they wouldve gotten their act together, but its pretty questionable. You certainly wouldnt how one every two by any means. The next case would be the socalled undisclosed cases. You constantly get out of the officials the notion that we cant tell you about everything that disrupted. Theres been a whole bunch of big ones that we disrupted, but they didnt get to court in the disrupted them a different brand can talk about it. I try to trace the data in various ways in the pages to be one quote here. Actually two quotes. One is from marxism and hes been in the middle of this for many years. Hes written several important books about terrorism. As a member of the intelligence community, he kept abreast about the plots in the United States. Have not seen any significant terrorist plots that have been disrupted and not disclosed. On the contrary, the government has to take credit for nonplot such as sting operations. I also check with them across as a form of Deputy NationalIntelligence Officer for transnational threats at the cia for many years. I asked him about these reports about these undisclosed report and since we are on cspan i have to be careful, but history is on first three words six words two words repeated three times. First one begins with z and the other one begins with us. So basically it seems thats very unlikely. The next step is how about people who have been disrupted on what is referred to as the al capone kind of thing. In other words, there are people who ive talked the talk. The fbi has found out about it, but they havent gotten into a conspiracy, moving towards doing something, but the talk is kind of dangerous sounding. You cant get them for simply saying jihadist type stuff. What happened in 100, 200 more cases. As the cases have been disrupt it by arresting them and connecting different charges, undecided performance last night at night in 84 and there is the phrase about the crimes. This comes pretty close because theyve actually thought or at least spoken about possibly committing a crime because thats all theyve 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, he wouldnt have let this guys record without that. Its almost impossible to answer about without buying a for you out for that. If youre an american citizen, disguised attempt things which they can be legitimately put them legitimately put them in jail for her, running drugs or forgery or Something Else in the past. The question is the spots are even more embryonic did disclose plots. If they do mice, they wouldve been tried on direct terrorism charges and they basically havent been. It is hard to see that a whole lot of days lot of days but if ever gone without the fbi. They have gone to the full thing. The next case with b. About deterring attack picture with the intelligence apparatus and for that matter, the Security Apparatus has deterred terrorists from attacking the United States because its very difficult. Im trying to agree that would be the case. Very much the case that theyre certain targets which are definitely very much unlikely to be attacked. For example, tried to hijack an airliner is incredibly difficult. Mark and i didnt study for the chance of being successful are under 1 above the security barriers there including policing ones. Another place that has fed another popular target that is probably offlimits are military bases. Many of the targets many of the terrorists want to attack military bases because unlike what you are a radicalization and so forth, as far as the serpent turn, the chief thing that causes them to radicalize his hostility to american policy. A stop hostility to democracy, not desire to create caliphates or sharia law. To give you an example, you may remember the Boston Marathon bomber who has had on the boat. And while he was fair, he wrote out a certain manifesto. This is totally typical in cases, this kind of verbiage coming out of wood the terrorists. Our actions came at the message. The u. S. Government is killing our innocent civilians. As a muslim i cant stand to see such evil go unpunished. You are one of us have you heard us all. We are beginning to rise up. Basically hostility to american Foreign Policy in the middle east, military and political. Therefore an attack would be really terrific essay to express that, but its very hard to do, so they tend to focus on easy bases such as those that are in, you know, recruiting stations in cities and so forth. The problem with this however, did you turn saying is if are dedicated jihadist and you cant bring down an airliner and you say im not going to do anything, theres other possible targets. The jihadist says i am going to take down an airliner. I cant take out an airliner so not going to be jihadist as opposed to any other number of targets that get attacked with on serb poets in san bernardino. It is hard to see if they are deflated by the fact they cant get their Gold Standard terrorist target down why they should continue to keep doing this is really questionable. The idea that deterrence is really very affect this. Finally, there is the notion that we havent found these terrorists weve only cut the terrorists smartphones are still out there. Well, if thats the case, why dont they do something . The longer the way, the more likely they are to be attacked and be found out. The idea that only the ones have been caught and the smart ones are still out there suggests if they are smart they would be trying to do something and they certainly havent done it. The overall effect on this is basically the amount of threat disclosed and undisclosed its really quite limited. I only have a minute or two last. What i would like to do is say a quick bang about Public Opinion on terrorism. We may want to come back to this later. Weve done quite a bit of looking at the trends of Public Opinion since 9 11. They are just about all five. Badly since the end of 2001. If you ask of you feel theres been other terrorist attacks, is it likely, not likely he might be killed by terrorists. Do you more or less safe . Do you think the United States is winning the war on terrorism and so forth . The bounce around with events, but they are basically flat all the way through. You think they would be some erosion over this period of time. As far as i can see there hasnt been and hasnt been and this is before isis added on. A long period of time with no attacks, no big attacks to speak out. Osama bin laden has been captured and still there hasnt been any erosion. The conclusion on this is the scariest things on it, but the final one is essentially that one of the problems is this kind of spooky this kind of terrorism as a kind of spooky foreign referent, namely islam in the middle east. There is no center to it. It is similar to fears about domestic communists who also have an ideology of some sort of are associated with an international spooky international movement. Even though very little happened, we are concerned about bad and their security was very high. The witch hunts in europe. The other adversaries a double and went time they became convinced that witches existed among us who are doing all sorts of diabolical things. Over a period of time, tens of thousands of witches, mostly women were executed in europe. Eventually that takes it away, but it took 200 years and thats a fairly gloomy conclusion for my talk right now. Thanks for your attention. [applause] i do wish to thank chris for inviting us here today. As chris mentioned, i mentioned should mayor so im very comfortable with numbers. And to me, if youre going to talk about this, we need to think about how we quantify what the risk his future terrorism and compare that to other hazards. Its a more rational basis for decisionmaking. As an engineer, john doesnt like any equations at all. The books have one equation and so im working on jobs. That could be a third boat. How do we