Irregular Warfare Podcast - Digital Terrorists: Policy and Practice in the Online Counterterrorism Fight

Episode Date: April 22, 2022

In this episode, we consider how extremists of all types have exploited maneuver space online, and what this means for efforts to counter violent extremism today. To do so, we're joined by Nick Rasmussen, executive director of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, and Dr. Daniel Byman, professor at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service whose most recent book is Spreading Hate: The Global Rise of White Supremacist Terrorism. They discuss how the online environment has changed over the past fifteen years, creating opportunities for violent extremists and challenges for the stakeholders working to counter their efforts. They also describe both emerging and enduring threats facing the counterterrorism community, before considering how governments and civil society can work to identify, disrupt, and prevent violent extremism in ways that balance security, free expression, privacy, and trust. Intro music: "Unsilenced" by Ketsa Outro music: "Launch" by Ketsa CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Once we step outside of the zone of international terrorism, where a person's activity, their engagement online, they're attached to designated terrorist organizations tied to the overseas environment like ISIS or Al-Qaeda, it puts them clearly in the crosshairs of federal law enforcement. But if you flip the page and you're someone engaged in commentary engagement of a far-right or white supremacist flavor, well then, where does the line start and stop between legitimate, though perhaps extreme, political activity on one hand

and criminally prosecutable terrorism-related activity on the other? So we can be cynical about social media companies, but these companies have concerns, and legitimate ones, that if they act, they will be seen as being on one side of a political debate. So they're worried about a regulatory environment. They're worried about an antitrust environment that's going to be punitive. And so if we can have some degree of consensus that Nazis are bad, it gives these companies a lot more freedom to experiment, a lot more freedom to make mistakes, frankly. Welcome to episode 51 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. I am your host, Shana Sinnott. And today I am joined by special guest co-host, Audrey Alexander, of West Point's Combating Terrorism Center.

In today's episode, we consider how extremists of all types have exploited maneuver space online, and what that means for countering violent extremism in today's complex environment. Our guests begin by introducing the online and offline environments that extremists and terrorists operate in today. They discuss how the environment has changed over the past 15 years, creating opportunities and challenges for violent extremists and the stakeholders working to counter their efforts. After discussing the range of factors that shape responses to domestic violent extremists compared to foreign terrorist organizations, we explore emerging and enduring threats facing the counterterrorism community, including white supremacy extremism and the exploitation of communications technology. Our guests conclude by considering how governments and civil society can work to identify, disrupt, and prevent violent extremism in ways that balance

security, free expression, privacy, and trust. Nick Rasmussen is the Executive Director of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism. A national security professional with more than 27 years of U.S. government service, Nick held senior counterterrorism posts at the White House and in the U.S. intelligence community from 2001 to 2017. He concluded his government career as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Nick continues to serve as a non-resident senior national security fellow at the McCain Institute for International Leadership. Dr. Daniel Byman is a professor at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. He has written extensively on terrorism, international security, and civil and ethnic conflict,

and serves as a senior fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings. Dan's government service includes his time as a professional staff member with the 9-11 Commission and with the joint 9-11 inquiry staff of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. His most recent book is Spreading Hate, The Global Rise of White Supremacist Terrorism. You are listening to the Irregular Warfare podcast, a joint production of the Princeton Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern War Institute at West Point, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals. Here's our conversation with

Nick Rasmussen and Dan Byman. Nick Rasmussen, Dan Byman, thank you so much for joining us today on the Irregular Warfare podcast. We're really looking forward to this conversation. It's terrific to be here, Shauna and Audrey, and I'm really, really grateful that you invited me and Professor Byman to join you. Let me add my thanks as well. I'm thrilled to be here. Great. And so today we're going to be talking about some pretty important content as it relates to the use of the online environment for extremists. And I think it's important to set the scene a little bit. So I'd start with you, Nick. What operational environment do terrorists live in today? What factors shape this operational

environment? I think of the online extremist and terrorist ecosystem right now as being more diverse, dynamic, and challenging than really at any point in the recent past. In a way, it's one of those prior times we talked about the ungoverned spaces that terrorists exploit, either through developing safe haven or finding ways to evade the reach of intelligence and security services. Well, nowhere is there more of an ungoverned space right now than in the online domain. And I think governments around the world are struggling to find ways to regulate that environment, to moderate that environment, to deal with the emerging threat implications of that online environment. And I

know it's easy to always say that today's problems are worse, harder, more complex than before, but I really do believe that in this case. Certainly in the 20 years since 9-11, the online ecosystem has become a much more dynamic and challenging place for those engaged in counterterrorism work. So Dan, from your perspective, how have you seen the space shifting and evolving? And have you seen the same evolution when it comes to domestic terrorists, but also international actors and violent extremists abroad. I've seen a lot of change, and it's worth pointing out some of it's good as well as some increased dangers. So one thing to start with really is that the groups themselves are different in many ways than the challenges 10, 15 years ago. When I first began looking at this space, I at least was worried about very organized jihadist groups that were exploiting the space

with some top-down structures. And then that was joined by a lot of people who had kind of different level affiliations with these groups, like the Islamic State, where you'd have very skilled propagandists, but also a lot of amateurs chiming in. So both top-down and bottom-up efforts. In my view, the tech companies have made very important strides at reducing that danger. Also very important, though, is a lot of the leaders of these groups are dead. Their havens are greatly diminished.

And we have a lot less presence in real life as well as online. So the two go together. But the far right is another kettle of fish. And here, often in a good way, you have relatively weak groups. So we could talk about a group like Atomwaffen or something like that. But the fact that that's one of the bigger ones we can come up with actually shows you how weak the group structure is in this. But you have extremely robust networks and large numbers of well-plugged-in individuals who are in communication with one another.

And in the online space, a lot of them are communicating with people who are not at the most extreme, but who are engaged in more traditional politics. So as Nick said, it's incredibly complex and the solution set needs to change as well. If Dan and I had been having this conversation with you eight, 10 years ago, or even three, four, five years ago, or even three, four, five years ago, we would barely be touching on the phenomenon that Dan pointed to right now, and that is far-right extremism and violent extremism or white supremacist forms of extremism and terrorism. We would have been almost exclusively focused on what known designated entity, large globally present terrorist groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda were

doing around the globe. While we would have been having a different conversation, I think we would have been having the same sort of frustrations in terms of our ability to kind of impede that activity. I'll give you one simple anecdote for kind of the way in which the problem may have changed over the last 10 years, or even longer than that, three to 14 or 15 years. At the point when we in government were first dealing with AQAP, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and their online magazine, Inspire, we were very worried about the ability of AQAP to use that magazine to disseminate bomb-making instructions. And we were literally in a position where we were responding to an organization that was posting in PDF form online directions that might reach tens or dozens

of people. We could literally count the downloads and figure out who we needed to worry about, where they were, and kind of the spread of this particular bomb-making technology was. Well, if you flash forward to today, that seems like a pretty quaint problem set to be trying to manage back then. Back then, it certainly didn't seem that way, but there wasn't anywhere near the global reach with that online content that we're seeing in the current environment. And as Dan pointed out, as that bumps up against legitimate political activity, it makes it even more difficult for governments to engage in activity to counter that online engagement. Has each type of group adapted to how the United States has addressed them so far, given that it's mostly tools related to international terrorism that we've dealt

with, Islamic extremism, and more tools that we have for the domestic space for far-right terrorism? Has that shaped the maneuver space that they have and allowed them to grow or reduce their capacity? Tremendously. In fact, to me, if I put my professor hat on, we use the term variables. I would say one of the top variables shaping these groups is the government response against them. And if you look at the jihadist movement, for example, the comparison between the 1990s when the U.S. government was concerned about this but did not make it a priority versus the post-911 aftermath when this was a top priority. You see that groups lose huge numbers of members to U.S. military

operations. There's an arrest campaign, an intelligence campaign around the world led by professionals like Nick. You have massive changes in group structure as a response. The U.S. changes the alliance structure, so there are new countries going after these. And these groups simply have to respond to these seismic changes going on. The same thing shows up in the domestic context as well. So with white supremacist and right-wing groups, there have been times where this has been a priority. And there have been times when the U.S. is not focused on it. And when it's a priority, these groups are extremely vulnerable.

Law enforcement, the FBI can be very effective. And so the groups change their structure, they change their strategies very much based on the government response. There are limits, Nick, right? So what the U.S. government can do for actors within the United States versus outside? Well, again, you know, once we step outside of the zone of international terrorism, where a person's activity, their engagement online, the things they say and express in the online space, when those are attached to designated terrorist organizations tied to the overseas environment like ISIS or al-Qaeda, it puts them clearly in the crosshairs of federal law enforcement.

Just the simple engagement in that kind of activity renders you likely to be prosecuted for material support to a foreign terrorist organization. But if you flip the page and you're someone engaged in commentary, engagement, online conversation of a far-right or white supremacist flavor, well then, where does the line start and stop between legitimate, though perhaps extreme, political activity on one, and criminally prosecutable terrorism-related activity on the other? And there just simply isn't the same legal framework or policy framework that applies across both domains. And not to make an argument for American exceptionalism, but we are certainly exceptional in this way, in that most countries don't deal with a domestic international divide in the way they think about the terrorism problem set.

But we do. Let me add two things to Nick's point, because I think this is really important. One is that the United States has a First Amendment that is considered central to the American identity. Among other democracies, so not counting the Chinas and Russias of the world, the U.S. view of free speech is seen as extreme and that many other democracies believe you should be balancing competing priorities and that could include public safety and so on. So the U.S. is very much exceptional in the free speech commitment, which shapes the domestic environment.

The other thing I would emphasize is domestic terrorism in the United States also brings in new actors. There are civil society organizations. We can name some like the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Anti-Defamation League that play a tremendous role in counter terrorism. And they're often the ones monitoring social media and being a bridge between law enforcement and the social media companies. This is actually perfect where you're jumping in, because I think another factor that we really need to think about is what are the limitations of the U.S. government's approach, not just to terrorism in the physical world, but also entering that online arena? And where can the government find partners? And what can those partnerships really look like?

So talking about civil society organizations, and I think here in the United States, at least attributable to our culture in a lot of ways, but also our priorities on speech affects what the U.S. government can do. But we can also look to our partners to supplement or augment our capabilities, also service providers. So I think teeing it up for Nick and asking as somebody who has worn first the U.S. government hat and is now wearing the hat of the global internet form to counterterrorism, what's your sort of perspective on partnership or cooperation and coordination or conversation between these different actors being government and non-government actors, whether it's service providers or NGOs or civil society groups? Sure. And again, this is kind of one of the great epiphanies I was having as I was departing government service a few years ago. You know, we were always so proud and self-satisfied with ourselves inside government because we felt we had constructed effective whole of government strategies to deal with our terrorism problems and our counterterrorism work around the world.

We would pat ourselves on the back and say, see, we have integrated all of the elements of national power, diplomatic intelligence, military, economic, homeland security, the whole array of things that were within the purview of the federal government. See, isn't that a great thing? And yet, as I left government, the landscape that Dan was just describing is one where government is not going to be able to deliver definitive dispositive outcomes in this space in the way that we would want. It just simply isn't. And so if we're going to get a handle on our domestic terrorism problems in particular, it's going to require a good deal of integrated work between government, the technology sector, and to Dan's point also, civil society, because it's very easy to imagine any one or two

of those actors overachieving in their work to address the use of the internet by bad actors. But we run just as much a risk of shutting down or eliminating legitimate speech from the online environment if we go overboard in this respect. So it makes the conversation about how to arrive at solutions in this online space much more complicated, because it's not something where government dictates. It's not something where tech has all the answers. And civil society has an essential voice that I think keeps all of us honest in this space. Dan, do you have any thoughts on that? So to echo, but hopefully not repeat Nick's points, there are a wide array of actors that need to be considered. And when we think about this, we also have to think about how this

integrates into broader social and political change in the United States. And that's, to me, what makes some of this so hard. So going back to jihadist terrorism, if you go back to the horror of 9-11, perhaps the only silver lining of that horrific event was Americans really came together. There was a tremendous sense of unity, a tremendous sense of purpose that followed that attack. When we see far-right violence in the United States, we're not seeing that unity. And this shows up most painfully after January 6th, of course. And this shows up most painfully after January 6th, of course. But this is adding two divisions.

And there's a sense that this is part of politics in some strange and horrible way, where some political figures refuse to condemn it. And I want to point out, this is a big shift. So Ronald Reagan, George Herbert Walker Bush, they campaigned against political figures who were white supremacists. They said, vote for Democrats. The Tea Party, which certainly was very critical of President Obama, at Tea Party rallies, the people would turn their back when people brought in Nazi or white supremacist signs. And we're not seeing that clear line between legitimate politics, even in areas where Americans will disagree, and the violent extreme. And that needs to be restored. It's easy to say, but super hard to do. So one thing I want to pull on that thread before we

return, and I ask you to elaborate on something else, but even in my own research and working with other folks in the field, I think it's interesting because we identify unity behind agreement on a grouping troublesome as a rallying point to help us push forward. But the Global Coalition Against ISIS was one of the times where there's the most agreement about how to deal with a threat. And yet it was still extremely difficult to deal with content online. Do you target content that's mandated by the group? Are you targeting pro-IS content? Are we worried about operational security guidance and bomb making instructions? Are we worried about operational security guidance and bomb making instructions? Are we worried about attack posters? They may look really silly to us, but are legitimate to those actors.

But taking a step back, I think that you've really punctuated important factors about the environment within which we're talking about these threats. And even though the political environment is one factor and an important factor, I'd like to talk about your book a little bit, which you recently released, and it's called Spreading Hate, The Global Rise of White Supremacist Terrorism. So while writing this book and sort of reflecting on these trends more broadly, I think you've already talked about what is that political appetite and how has it differed from the post 9-11 era. But could you elaborate a little bit more about what this means for the online environment or combating violent extremists in the United States,

particularly of the far right persuasion? So we can be cynical about social media companies, and I tend to think that they often do the right thing, but only after having exhausted other options. And if they're going to act, they want political cover. And part of it, as you said, there are kind of taxonomy questions of what you remove and how you conceptualize these groups. There are very difficult technical challenges as to how you identify particular types of content.

But because of the overlap with mainstream politics, these companies have concerns, and legitimate ones, that if they act, they will be seen as being on one side of a political debate. And of course, we see this already, where Democrats are complaining that these companies are not acting decisively enough. Republicans claim that they're engaging in left-wing censorship. So they're worried about a regulatory environment. They're worried about an antitrust environment that's going to be punitive if they ignore prevailing political wins. And so if we can have some degree of consensus that Nazis are bad and we don't want them exploiting social media companies, I never would have thought that would be the hardest thing

to create. But if we can have some consensus on things like this, it gives these companies a lot more freedom to experiment, a lot more freedom to make mistakes, frankly, as they move toward the right direction. the linkage between online expression and offline harm, where online expression leads, mobilizes, animates, drives individuals to actually carry out violent acts, then that will remove it from the question of whether it falls within the framework of a legitimate First Amendment protection conversation and instead can return more to a traditional law enforcement and counterterrorism frame, one that we're comfortable with. But it's a difficult line for companies to walk. It's a difficult line for governments to walk. Governments have prescription tools. They can designate groups as terrorist organizations. That is more easily done when they operate outside of your traditional

domestic political framework, an ISIS or an al-Qaeda. But when you're talking about a group that's operating inside the United States that is on the fringe of legitimate political discourse, then labeling that group as a terrorist organization carries with it significant consequences. And as Dan pointed out, it means that government is putting its finger on the scale in a political way, in a manner that's uncomfortable. And companies find themselves similarly situated. They will be seen to be taking sides if they weigh in on one side or another of a political debate, unless you can tighten that linkage between online activity and offline harm. And then at that point, that delegitimizes the form of expression, regardless of its ideological place on the spectrum. the form of expression, regardless of its ideological place on the spectrum.

Dan, what did your research find about the emerging transnational nature of far-right or white supremacist type of ideology? Is that something that is occurring? And does that change the framework in which we can operate to address it? Shana, that's a great question. So the answer is yes, but I want to put up a couple caveats to this. So the most important thing we're seeing globally is a global discourse. So you see discussions that are happening in Europe about immigrants coming in, also being taken up in the United States, and then showing up in a manifesto in an attacker in New Zealand in 2019. And this sort of back and forth about what's happening today in Ukraine, about the end of the war in Afghanistan, whatever the cause is, there is a global discussion among

different white supremacists, and they're echoing each other, riffing on each other, and building on each other. There's also some sense of a modus operandi and models that are showing up around the world. So if you go back to 2011, when Andres Breivik did a bombing and then went to an island and shot 77 kids in a devastating shooting, it was a kind of, in his own mind at least, commando operation. He publishes a manifesto. He sends it online, given the technology at the time. We see echoes of this in Christchurch, where the shooter both is deliberately emulating this. We see echoes of this in Christchurch, where the shooter both is deliberately emulating this. We see echoes of it in subsequent attacks in the United States. So we're seeing certain

methods that catch on and become trendy. What we're not seeing, though, is a kind of massive training apparatus comparable to what we saw with al-Qaeda in particular, but also to some degree, the Islamic State. We're not seeing the havens where people have some ability to orchestrate attacks and launch them at the United States or other countries. So I think the transnational dimension is tremendously important. And I think it's enabled by social media. At the same time, there are going to be limits on this and even vulnerabilities, which we can discuss further if you want. So before we dig further into sort of the policy responses, one question I sort of wanted to follow up on the points you're talking about is decentralization. So, you know, we've seen groups at least theoretically be able to be decentralized.

And we can look at like Louis Beam and the legacy of white supremacy in the United States and creating opportunities for groups to act in these decentralized ways. But I think that it can also create command and control issues for these organizations that make them extremely inefficient in terms of we don't want an efficient terrorist organization, but saying that it devolves into violence for the sake of violence instead of violence to advance these aims as they perceive them. So could you sort of speak

to that a little bit more and whether or not you see that as an issue for the contemporary transnational far-right extremist movements? Audra, I think that's absolutely right. I've always been somewhat of a skeptic of leaderless resistance. There are kind of two things about it. One is you can pick up a gun and kill people, right? And given U.S. gun laws, that's not particularly hard. So individuals can act and they can do horrible things. The other is it's harder for counterterrorism. There is no broader structure to penetrate. If you find a leader, you're getting three people rather than an organized group. So many of the standard approaches are limited. But from a group perspective, it has huge drawbacks. The groups tend to go in 20 different directions at once.

And so you have members of the movement attacking different targets with different priorities. You can't train people well. So you may have small groups that shoot targets in the woods, but in terms of organization, it's going to be limited. That has big implications for operational security because you don't train people on security well. So there's an incoherence and an incompetence that tends to come with legalist resistance as well. Again, I would stress that doesn't mean they can't kill people, but in terms of actually achieving their objectives, I think it makes it much harder.

on. Attacks of the sort that kind of emanate from these individuals who've grabbed onto a narrative in the online environment and use it to carry out a hateful act in their local environment. Yes, in kind of gross terms, they may not produce much impact. They may not kill thousands. They may not do anything that rises to the level of a 9-11 attack or a 7-7 attack in the United Kingdom. But these attacks often live on after themselves as well. The Tree of Life synagogue attack in the United Kingdom. But these attacks often live on after themselves as well. The Tree of Life synagogue attack in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania will unfortunately serve as inspiration to future individuals driven by anti-Semitic rage to carry out hateful attacks. The Mother Emanuel AME church shootings by Dylann Roof in Charleston, South Carolina, or the Christchurch attack that Dan already alluded to, these become iconic in the

worst possible way events, and they live on and serve as inspiration to kind of similarly motivated individuals. So yes, they may not help those individuals achieve their political ends, but they serve as this powerful motivating force, and those individuals become heroes in the kind of warped, twisted way that I really can't understand or explain, but it seems to be a reality. I have to remind myself of that, not to minimize the impact that these attacks can have, even if it doesn't lead to the kind of political outcomes that these actors want to achieve. comment on disruption, both from your position as a director of the National Counterterrorism Center, now with the Global Internet Forum for Countering Terrorism. So you've seen it from a variety of different vantage points. How should we think about disruption, or is that even the right word when we consider the environment and activity that Dan has just laid out? Again, another kind of those post-government epiphanies that one has when you can see things

more clearly after your period of government service. I think in the domestic political environment that Dan has described here today and has written about so eloquently in his book, law enforcement will be the kind of the lagging indicator in many ways. They will come upon the event or come upon the perpetrator, unfortunately, probably pretty late in the game. Our opportunities to gain left of boom impact on this problem set come not so much from traditional law enforcement and intelligence, but more from community-based prevention programs. And again, I've always been an advocate of the work that the Department of Homeland Security either does or funds through various grant programs that support community-based programs that operate across the United States that do a great job of identifying at-risk individuals and

trying to find different tools, different strategies, different points of impact that may disrupt the person's pathway as they move towards radicalization and violence. And that's a very soft power approach, but that's appropriate to the domestic or homeland environment. We are not going to treat our domestic violent extremists or potential terrorists as subject to drone campaigns, for example. It's just a different toolkit here in the homeland as it ought to be. But it does suggest it's a harder problem in the homeland, I would argue, than overseas. We talk about prevention programming and looking at disruption, and disruption can be everything from content removal to arrests and looking at the actors involved in that. But I think one thing that we've seen the field kind of evolve to over time is getting to how do we

connect that online and offline, especially when it comes to either creating prevention programs or identifying people or groups who are vulnerable to escalation. What are your thoughts on how we can better bridge that online-offline, whether it's speaking to a law enforcement audience, whether it's speaking to civil society groups, or whether it's speaking to service providers? One thing that has happened, of course, is that law enforcement is much more aware of what can be revealed by social media. And, you know, this is something where a decade ago, this was a young person's sort of world. And people who are frankly my age kind of looked at it askance and said, you know, what's going on here? And many law enforcement personnel didn't recognize

the tremendous amount of dialogue and activity going on in this space. But of course, many of the people who are in this world, they think of themselves as heroes and are proud. So they're talking a lot and they're bragging a lot and they're revealing a lot of information. They're not trained in operational security and they're often making it clear who exactly is in their network. Money is flowing. So there's a lot of activity going on that makes them vulnerable to arrest if any of this turns violent. And if you look at the January 6th investigation, a huge amount of data, a huge amount of the arrest record comes from the broader social media world and government monitoring of this.

However, January 6th is an illustration of the failure of many people in government to actually identify dangerous activity despite a lot of flags being raised online. So this is still a problem, is that ability to monitor and having more systematic bridges to civil society organizations that are able to do it. I tend to be, I'll say, hopeful but still skeptical on the prevention side. And a lot of that to me is just the scale of it, that it's such a massive number of people who are online and who are engaged in hateful activity and to sort out the relatively small number who are prone to violence and then to find some way to take them off is to me an exceptionally difficult endeavor. I have great admiration for the folks working in this space. And frankly, if they have a 5% success rate and stop one attack, that's awesome. I'll take that. I don't

want to have the bar be too high, but I think we need to recognize that there are going to be real limits to this. Dan's exactly right. Prevention work is really, really difficult and challenging. And I remember when I used to testify in front of the Congress on this issue, members of Congress would rightly want to know, what are your metrics of success? How do you measure whether your program is having impact? Are the dollars you're asking us to allocate to this actually disrupting attacks? Again, to Dan's metric there. And my answer, more or less, I was slightly more respectful than this was, I don't know, but I know we have to try. And I know it's almost irresponsible for us not to use this tool and to try, even if our success rate can't be documented in the same way that many federal programs are able to

document their success rate. So I think Dan's 100% right on that. Dan, in your research, what have you seen about the effects of some of these non-governmental efforts? Non-governmental efforts are tremendously important on the domestic side. And let me say two things just to give examples. One is that when you go back to when the Klan and other groups had many chapters and were very strong in U.S. history, a key role was played by non-government actors to take them down. And there were a series of lawsuits, many of which were led by the Southern Poverty Law Center,

that bankrupted several Klan organizations and neo-Nazi groups. And it was incredibly effective and it was something that was done with encouragement, I would say, by the U.S. government, but it was very much a civil society effort. And the other is monitoring. A lot of our information about bad actors who's online comes from the civil society organization. But more broadly than all of this is one of the best ways of fighting these really nasty groups and causes is some sense of shame and some sense of social change. And so having organizations that are promoting positive change has huge long-term implications.

So if you look at things ranging from civil rights to gay rights to a wide range of causes, it's often been civil society actors in the lead. And at first, in many cases, their efforts were poo-pooed. At times, they were seen as causing more trouble. But over time, the positive social change had far more impact than anything a single government figure or business person could achieve. So I think one of the things that's really interesting about this is looking at the broadening and how in some ways having that organic social mobilization is really, really important to have buy-in from partners. But then another reality is the shift to great power competition. As much as we want to identify new policy solutions or tools and partnerships, it also is happening at a time where funding is becoming more limited, where resources in general are more limited, including a very precious resource of political agenda and political desire, even from top down.

So what are some of your reflections on the outlook for this space, given the shift to great power competition? This is one of those areas where I kind of feel badly for my colleagues who have the set of responsibilities that I used to have working at the National Counterterrorism Center, because I think the online environment and the shift to greater concern about the domestic forms of extremism that we face here in the United States, that clearly has kind of risen to the top of the pile. If you measure by volume or sense of the threat, if you go by things like FBI director testimonies or director of national intelligence testimony, that's clearly where the center of gravity of this problem set is. But it has not meant that the other set of issues tied to foreign terrorist organizations operating

overseas is really any less of a concern. The newer forms of the problem are simply additive on top of that set of problems we were already dealing with. And so that leaves certainly government leaders in the position of having to cover a wider threat landscape with probably fewer resources, because the pull of resources will be towards issues like state power competition, and rightly so. So rather than bemoaning that state of affairs, it simply is, it's not something that you can wish away or argue against. I think it then becomes incumbent upon our terrorism crowd in the government to simply be more precise and as

precise as they can be about where and when and how much risk we are assuming tied to various conflict zones overseas so that decisions can be made by policymakers in full view of those risk assessments. That is most clearly brought home by the Afghanistan experience. It's not as if the drawdown and ultimately the pullout from Afghanistan was done without awareness that it might lead to an increased threat from terrorist actors operating in South Asia. It was hardly that. It was instead a realization that this was a trade-off worth making given other national security, domestic, political, and economic priorities that this administration had. And that's a very different conversation than perhaps you would have had a decade ago about Afghanistan. So I feel sorry for my colleagues, because I think the landscape becomes more complex, their toolkit harder to expand,

and their slice of the resource pie likely to shrink rather than increase in coming years. I'll add, you know, a lot of successful current terrorism is simply resourcing. And that if you have more intelligence, more law enforcement, you're usually going to get more effective results. And there's a whole lot of variation within that. But shifts in resources have often produced dramatic changes in effectiveness. And as Nick said, that's going to change and going to be reduced. And maybe that's a healthy recalibration, but it's important to know.

But let me add two things. One is, if you look at Russia in particular, part of what the U.S. is concerned about is still linked to counterterrorism. So a lot of what Russia does in Europe, in the United States, to a lesser but still real degree, is what we used to call subversion. And it's trying to weaken the, I would say, the core of democracy. It's trying to play the ends against the middle. At times, Russia does political assassination of its own dissidents. It has funded groups like the Night Wolves, these street gangs. There have been individuals who have been white supremacists who have received training in Russia. So there's a host of activities tied to great power competition, for which our current terrorism toolkit certainly

won't be the main effort. I don't want to exaggerate it, but will still be useful. But I actually think, and here I defer to Nick, this is especially true in the social media space where a lot of what we're concerned about is Russia manipulating information, Russia using false identities, a kind of bad information environment. And obviously, great powers are different than terrorist groups. But the progress that I think social media companies have made in terms of developing capabilities to reduce bad actors on their platforms, to be aware of what's going on, I think a lot of that would be useful as Russia and China become more and more important to broader questions about the quality of information and the health of the online environment? Dan makes a really important

point there when he mentions the ways in which state actors may use tools tied to disinformation and misinformation to achieve their subversive ends. Most of what we've talked about today is actually the easier part of the problem set, because we're trying to talk about something that you can actually measure and feel and touch, and that is violent acts carried out by individuals motivated by an extremist ideology. When you're talking about the application of misinformation and disinformation to try to achieve political ends, as Dan said, to turn the two ends of the spectrum against each other and to undermine our politics here, boy, the toolkit gets way harder for a government. And to my mind, the ultimate form of asymmetrical warfare, and how do you create any kind of

deterrence framework? How do you develop any kind of reliable attribution framework that allows us to confidently respond? I know all I'm doing is identifying problems, but this is what this irregular warfare community does, is try to figure out how to develop better tools to deal with the asymmetric kinds of conflicts that we're likely to see in the future. Misinformation, disinformation, it takes the problem we've been talking about and makes it even more complicated and even less susceptible to easy solutions. One quick note to wrap all of that together, and I'm going to pass it over to Shana, but I think especially as we look at this state actor with asymmetric components to a threat, also looking at Iran and what Iran is doing in the mis-dis and proxy mis-dis information landscape is really, really dynamic and evolving

and something that we also need to keep a pulse on as the counterterrorism community, but also the national security community. Nick, your practitioner perspective and Dan, your academic perspective, we always ask what are the implications for these communities, and I'm going to reverse it on you. So Dan, I'm going to ask what the implications are of your research and what we've discussed for practitioners. And I know you do speak to gaps in current policies in your work that might be helpful to refer to here. And Nick, I'd ask you to speak to what are the implications for scholars and how they can contribute towards this discussion. So Dan, I'll start with you with implications for policymakers. So there are a few to me that

are very important, at times somewhat obvious, but nevertheless require attention. One of the biggest is simply resources. That a lot of my work is about people who have somehow gone under the radar screen, or maybe they were on the radar screen, but there just wasn't enough capacity, whether in government or civil society, to handle this. And so this is a problem that has to be resourced because the ramifications of successful attacks are huge, not just in terms of the human cost, the lives lost, but because of the political devastation this can cause, how it can shape policy and warp policy in many bad ways. There are particular communities that we should be focused on, and one we haven't talked about

are the broader security communities. So the military and police communities are very important to this. And I applaud what Secretary Austin has been doing in terms of trying to increase vigilance within the military community. To me, one of the biggest ones for the far right and white supremacist world is police. And that's true around the world. They are the front line. And a bad policeman makes a community miserable in so many different ways. And I believe from what I've seen, it's a very small number, but being very aggressive in identifying those bad actors is very important. And here, the social media record is tremendously important for anyone who is, you know, under 35, they've left a pretty big record on social media

about their views and simply being able to tap into that to that placement is extremely important. And the last thing I'll say is just to repeat the political point, which is there are things one can do technically from a counterterrorism point of view, from the point of view of social media companies to make things better. And those are really important. But all this exists in a certain political context. And unfortunately, the policy tolerance of many Americans for extreme rhetoric and willingness to look the other way at violence, at people who are embracing hateful conspiracy theories, that is very dangerous.

And the politics needs to go back on track if we're going to have longer-term solutions to many of these problems. Scholars often want to know what kind of research can do that will have the most practical impact on the problem set rather than kind of writing articles for article's sake or publishing books for book's sake. From my perspective, the online environment right now is just so, so difficult for the law enforcement community, the intelligence community, and the tech companies to get their arms around in terms of figuring out how to separate signal from noise because the volumes are just so massive.

So with that in mind, the more scholars and researchers can do to help all of those three groups, government, tech companies, law enforcement, intelligence, to help all of us understand when and how online engagement with extreme ideologies actually takes the leap to offline real-world harm, the more they can help us understand that dynamic and therefore allow government law enforcement and tech companies to target their own limited resources more effectively, the more they can do that, the greater the contribution they will be making to our common counterterrorism objectives. That's a hard, hard problem. Predictive analysis is very, very hard. But if we simply end up having to focus our resources on every person who says something hateful or expresses something hateful on the

internet, we're not really going to be doing much to actually disrupt actual real-world harm. So again, I would call on my scholar friends to try to find ways to understand that linkage between offline and online harm as a queuing and a tipping mechanism for those inside government, inside law enforcement. Great. And I think that's a great place to stop. Dan Byman, Nick Rasmussen, thank you so much for joining us today. I learned a lot from this and we appreciate you taking the time to share your knowledge.

Thanks for having me. Yeah, I really enjoyed it. Thanks, Shauna. Thanks, Audrey. Yeah, I really enjoyed it. Thanks, Shauna. Thanks, Audrey. Thanks again for joining us for episode 51 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. IWP releases a new episode every two weeks. In the next episode, Ben and Laura will discuss maritime irregular warfare in the Indo-Pacific with Greg Poling of the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at CSIS and Colonel Sean Berg, Deputy Commander of Special Operations Command, Indo-Pacific.

Following that, Abigail and Laura will revisit how cyber policy influences the irregular warfare space. Please be sure to subscribe to the Irregular Warfare podcast so you don't miss an episode. The podcast is a product of the Irregular Warfare Initiative. We are a team of volunteer practitioners and researchers dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals. You can follow and engage with us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, or LinkedIn. You can also subscribe to our monthly newsletter for access to our written content, upcoming community events, and other resources. If you enjoyed listening to today's episodes as much as we enjoyed making it,

please leave a comment and a positive rating on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to the Irregular Warfare podcast. Additionally, you can also follow the Combating Terrorism Center on Twitter at CTCWP. And one last note, what you hear in this episode are the views of the participants and do not represent those of Princeton, West Point, or any agency of the U.S. government. Thanks again, and we will see you next time.