 Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Think Tech Hawaii studios. I'm Andrew, the security guy, and today we've got another exciting episode. I think you'll find this very interesting here at Security Matters. Dr. Joshua Senai is joining us today, and he is a foremost expert in terrorism and counter-terrorism. He teaches, he writes, he's also a consultant, and we're gonna talk about some of the problems with that bit of work. I know you probably know what an active shooter is and you know what a terrorist is, but in the researching of how do we sort of work on those problems, there are some issues, and Dr. Senai is very familiar with these, so I think I'm looking forward to this. Dr. Senai, thank you so much for taking time to join me today. I think this topic is vital, and I think a lot of people really aren't aware, so I'm looking forward to an enlightening conversation today. You welcome me too. In fact, I'd rather be in Hawaii than in Rachel, Maryland. Okay, I get that a lot. So give up for folks in our audience who may not be familiar. Maybe give your background a little bit, share some of you know, as much as you care to share, kind of bring them up to speed with your work and what you've been up to lately. Yeah, so I have a doctorate in comparative politics in the Middle East from Columbia University, but when I came to Washington in 84, I switched over to international security and began working on terrorism and counterterrorism issues. And I worked a lot on radicalization into violent extremism. And then in January 2011, when Jared Lochner carried out an attack against a congresswoman Giffords, everyone started thinking about the threat posed by active shooters. And then I began to see that there were a lot of similarities between those become radicalized into terrorism and those who become going trajectory into violence and becoming active shooters. I began researching that and then I wrote, I published a pocket handbook on active shooter prevention through ASIS International. And then I also then also the problem with the insiders, like Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and others. And then I'm going to realize that again, a lot of similarities between those become terrorists, active shooters and insiders. Many terrorists and active shooters are in fact insiders as well. And that many of them also engage in attacks against their fellow coworkers. So then I began to realize that then to put it together, a number of us came up with the concept of active threats. Because in many incidents, you have all four of them play out. For example, at Fort Hood, Major Nidal Hassan was an ideologically driven terrorist. He was also a psychologically driven active shooter. He had all sorts of psychological issues. He was an insider. He was known to his co-workers as someone who was problematic. And then he engaged in workplace violence, work on work at type three. And so the issues, how do you begin to identify such perpetrators during the crucial pre-incident periods? And many of the warning signs can be noticed by those around them. So I began to write about these issues. And I still find that many of these issues are not clearly understood by even many analysts. They tend to look at the problems as silos. So it's only active shooter, only a terrorist or only workplace violence, rather than seeing that they all come together in many incidents, and that by identifying the pre-incident warning observables associated with each type, then begin to understand that someone you may, you know, may be on a trajectory, carrying out an attack, especially when they decide to acquire weapons out of the blue, you know. Sure. Not to become a hunter like Nidal Hassan when he went to the guns galore store in Killeen, Texas. He wasn't there to buy a hunting rifle, but a cop killing gun. So the salesman asked himself, well, why is the soldier requiring a Glock, you know, handgun? Yeah, you would think he could just go to the armory and get something if he needed, right? Right, right. On base. But then that would then there would be a record of that. So he was definitely trying to do that in secret, you know, concealing that behavior. So I think that our field can be improved by looking at these four disparate threats as part of an overall active threat category. Yeah, it's interesting. I've never seen it. I'm aware of the, you know, the path, the escalation of violence, you know, that path. But I think a lot of people may not know why it's so important that the so if you see something say something or if someone you know is having a problem or some sort of difficulty that we need to engage because they could become any of those things that that that that first sign is that there's an issue of some type with them. And hopefully we can get them psychological help or whatever it may be that they need. It might be financial help. But what could propel someone and what they could become? I think a lot of people don't know and I've never really seen that trajectory like from from let's just say disgruntled person to multiple paths. I typically see it as an active shooter or as a insider threat like a thief, you know, someone who steals information or something. But you don't often see it displayed as a I don't really would call that like a category or something. I don't even know how to define that. Right. So if HR and security and legal had a tool that they could use to map where someone who appears to be troubled might be along, then they could take mitigative actions. Sure. You know, refer them to mental health counseling or professional counseling or law enforcement. And I've actually come up with a diagnostic tool that could can be used to map was trajectory. It begins with triggers was usually something that that will trigger them. You know, personal crisis, professional crisis, ideological crisis, yeah, might suddenly become upset, you know, US policy towards Middle East. Maybe stay at home orders. Right, right. You know, who knows, right? Right, like Nabil Hasan was very upset, but he was about to be deployed to Afghanistan. But a normal person would usually handle it in a constructive way. Sure. Okay, I'm going through a divorce. We'll work it out or professional crisis. But if you were psychologically troubled, and that's the second phase, then you respond in a negative way. Then in the third phase, you will begin to it's called you enter in the phase of violent ideation and fantasy, you will fantasize about taking revenge. And even that's normal. Most people, you know, fantasize about people they don't like, but but we'll stop at that. Sure. But once you cross the threshold, which is the fourth phase, then it becomes serious. And you will either then respond quickly, or you will take your time in predatory ways. So some of these low knuckle terrorist or active shooters taken like, you know, six months or a year to follow through on an attack. Once they start crossing the threshold, then they will start planning an attack. And they'll decide to shoot someone. And then they will go through the preparation phase where they will begin to acquire weapons, and decide on targeting. Then they will approach the target, and then they will carry out the attack. And throughout these phases, they all leak their intentions, whether in social media, or in person. So that's where you can catch them early on. See, that's where they see something, say something, you know, comes in. You think we've done a good job at collecting maybe these behavior indicators, or because you see, you see statistics about the events and the happenings and things like that. But I don't think I've come across a collection of the, I mean, we see the types of behaviors, but I don't think I've seen a model like, you know, with someone who buys weapons, for example, is, you know, 60% more likely to be coming out could shoot her or so I don't I haven't seen data like that. Is it is it is that data out there? Is it is it available around these particular people that we know are past cases, so that we could perhaps look forward to, you know, modeling data that could show us better examples of who could who has this potential? Yeah, that's that's an excellent point. And that's another weakness in the field. Ah, okay, that everyone talks about the needs, for example, to fight back, you know, during an incident, okay, you know, run hide or fight, right, right over and so on. But no one has put together a database of successful preemption incident phases. I've tried to I've done some of it. Okay, and I've just written an article that has been considered for publication. Okay, the volume in which I present 12 cases of successful preemption. Okay, the FBI of lone actor terrorists good 2000 up to today. I think that's one of the first times that someone has attempted to do this. So this is very important. And then, you know, I tried to figure out at what phase, what pre-incident phase were they able to preempt this individual, then, for example, and trap them or and so on. Sure. I've often said, at our at our infregard meetings, it seems like the the FBI don't get enough credit for all the good work that they do a lot of their their stuff. It never comes out all this things that they stop. Right. So for example, out of about 55 cases of lone actor terrorism, since 911, but I've come up with at least about 12 of them were successfully preempted. Awesome. And the goal is to increase the rate of pre of successful preemption. Sure. And you do that by providing law enforcement and others with the tools and the information they need to know how to track someone. Was the public involved in in the first identification of these individuals? Or was it in the ones that you studied? Was it law enforcement actually intervene because they learned something else learned of weapons purchase or something like that, other than like a hot tip from a friend or a co worker or something like that? Yes. So it's a mix. So you have those who are associated with these individuals informing the FBI and others about them. Okay. Yeah, so that that does give some validation to bringing, you know, we teach, you know, our staff, we teach everyone to look out for your neighbor, you know, and there's a reason why we should be looking out. And if your neighbor is not getting the help they need, you need to bring that to someone's attention. Yes. Oh, and after Nidal Hassan that successfully purchased his glock handgun at Guns Galore, the next time someone tried to do that who appeared suspicious, his name was a private Nasser Abdo. This time the salesman did contact the FBI. Oh, then the rest of him. Wow, good. So and was he was he so he was down the heading down a path to extremism or to violence? Okay. Wow. Interesting. Are these how do you feel we're doing with the profiling of looking because, you know, early on just to calling someone an insider threat, they have a variety of sort of options to how they're going to act out. Is the, you know, what differentiates or is it known, you know, what differentiates someone who who just becomes like an active shooter of their workplace, or someone who becomes an active shooter publicly, you know, that goes out to a mall or to a school, or someone who acts out, you know, maybe religiously, like the guy I know there was the kid that attacked the mosque, I think in Atlanta or something. So are these pro is there enough data to build profiles around where these folks may be headed? Yes. So once again, you can apply the diagnostic tool that I have developed, which actually is based on the work of others. Okay. All I do is just take it to the instagree. Awesome. Good. Well, thanks. Thank you for that. I think we may have to have a whole episode on that. Right now let's take a we're going to take a short break for about one minute. We're going to pay some bills and we'll be back right back with our show. Thank you. Aloha, I'm Krista Stadler, the host of non profits mean business to on think tech Hawaii, non profits mean business to investigate the operational challenges and costs related to managing nonprofit organizations, while encouraging our viewers to find a nonprofit organization that you're passionate about in our community. We are streamed live on think tech Hawaii by weekly at 12pm on Thursdays. Thank you so much for watching our show. We look forward to seeing you then. Mahalo. Hey, Aloha and welcome back to security matters. Today we're talking with Dr. Joshua Sinai about sort of some of the issues around defining you know what an active shooter is what an insider threat is some of the difficulties with the academia some of the difficulties with sharing data and information and really indicators of that threat to trajectory itself. Dr. Sinai, thanks again so much for joining us today. I know that you teach terrorism and counter terrorism in the in the university system. Are these are the are the mechanisms for discussing this this this narrative about how to counter you know how to intercede you know with someone who's on this path of violence or are these narratives available. I mean social media has been condemned for promoting you know these violent extremists you know in the United States and other places in the that they've built a good narrative around recruiting. Have we built a good counter narrative to that? I don't see much of it out there. Right well one one of the problems is that for counter terrorism to be effective it has to combine a number of different measures. One is coercion, military, diplomatic, economic, intelligence, beliefs and so on and a conciliatory in which you attempt to resolve the underlying causes of driving that drive an insurgency. And then and I see the threats as insurgencies. Okay, they don't just emerge out of the blue that there are problem areas that drive them. And unless you resolve them, it's very difficult to defeat an insurgency only through military measures, although those those are necessary. But but you have to resolve the underlying causes that drive them and one measure is to come up with a counter narrative. Because the ideologies that drive such individuals, you know, promise them, you know, all sorts of attractive solutions to their lives, you know, they will become heroes for the cause, martyrs, you know, and so on and so on. So how do you counter that, especially in the West? So a lot of academics have come up with methodologies to formulate counter narratives. But they don't actually come up with the content for them. Oh, so so we know how to do it. I see. That's interesting. The need to do it. Here's the methodology to do it. But there's no content. Sure, is it is it does it have to is it because it has to counter like a psychological appeal? Is that the, you know, that this counter narrative may not be known to a person who isn't drawn to the, to the insurgency narrative, you know what I mean? How would you? It's interesting dilemma. Right, because there are lots of problems that, you know, drive these individuals to become violent extremists. But there are also a lot of problems in society. So those problem areas need to be resolved to begin with. How do you provide them an attractive counter narrative without resolving the problems that motivate them? But that's that's one problem. Another one is that no one has really come up with metrics of effectiveness to assess the effectiveness of these counter narrative campaigns. Yeah, you know, we've only seen it seems. And again, the data I think comes from the FBI, but the it seems that we just see more and more. So what people see in the media is that these incidents are on the rise. But we don't really know if that's true because we don't know how many been stopped. We don't know where perhaps a someone that was considering something decided not to do it because they read a poster, or because they got some help. So we really don't know that they're rising. But we know that, you know, the media, you know, makes its money off of maybe promoting a bit of fear or something like that. I don't know if it's intentional or not, but they're promoting the data that we have. Yeah, so one of the problems is that, and actually, this is why I find the response to the current COVID-19 pandemic very interesting, because public health officials have come up with metrics to assess effectiveness in reducing the number of infections and fatalities. For example, they've come up with what they call the R curve, the rate of infection. R not, yeah. If it's above one, then it's not effective. If it's below one, then it is effective. So something like that should be applied to counterterrorism and also to countering violent extremism as well. Mm hmm. Yeah, you would think there would be some more, and I don't know that there's not, but a more effort expended in that area, right, a program of sort of like counter recruitment. I know they, you know, social media has been picked on a bit for having, you know, trend, they want them to take down this content that exists in a country that, you know, champions freedom of speech and things like that. I realize that's a bit problematic, but I sure don't see, just to my knowledge, where the this, there's a lot of discussion around retraining or maybe would it be an information campaign to, you know, where people can get help if they're considering ideas like that. I just I don't see much of that kind of stuff out there. Right. So that's why I once wrote an article about in which I presented a model to assess the effectiveness in countering violent extremism. And I use the British counterterrorism campaign in Northern Ireland as a case of best practice. Okay, they were able to resolve it. Yeah, so it's so it's doable. That's interesting. There's a known model out there. Sure. That's awesome. Right. We're also able to do it because the IRA at the very effective political front in Sinn Féin, and its leaders very effective. Yeah, the other terrorist groups don't have as capable leaders as Sinn Féin. So I'm also another problem is what is the population that you are dealing with? So in the case of Britain, I tried to figure out how to assess effectiveness in the campaign by coming up with the number of violent extremists in Britain that needed to be counted. Okay, let's say there are three million Muslims in Britain of those, let's say 10% hold extremist beliefs that are non violent. Among them, let's say another 10% of violent extremists. And let's say 5% of those are actual those who are planning an attack. Okay. So you need to direct a campaign at the community of violent extremists. Sure. Let's say there are 10,000 of those. So if you if you if you implement the campaign to go after them, then what is your success rate? Sure. Now, how many of them are you able to persuade to turn away from violent extremism? And just I mean, it's perfectly right to apply to extremists, hold extremist beliefs in a democracy. That's perfectly legitimate. Sure. So assess the effectiveness of a campaign you have. Let's come up with numbers. Okay, yeah, real something that's real numbers just like, you know, countering the pandemic. It's all about your numbers. Uh huh. Yeah, and you would think that you would think that everybody, everybody sees the one right though, the one active person, but a successful program obviously would stop, of course, hopefully the one but you're probably always going to have the one. The trick is to stop the other 999,999. That would be a very effective program. Right. Maybe maybe I've never seen an article. Oh, that has come up with such a figure. Ah, interesting. Well, that seems so like there's a lot of work to be done in that field. I am I'm glad that you're working on. We need more people working on it, I believe. We've got a minute or minute and a half left. If you'd like to leave some maybe closing thoughts for the audience, some things to think about out there from from your research or from maybe some of the things you've been teaching recently to the students. Yeah, so I think one, one thing is the need to come up with models that everyone can use in the field that are user friendly and that can be used as tools in everyday work for the operational community. There's one problem with academia is that some academics only talk to other academics, okay, providing methodologies and tools that the operational community can use, law enforcement, intelligence and so on. One weakness in the field that needs to be addressed, but that I've tried to do in my own work. Awesome. Well, thank you. Thank you very much for that work. And for our viewers out there, remember, you know, be be your be your brother's keeper, somebody's struggling with something, try to get them some help before they, you know, end up down this pathway and they're irrecoverable. You never know what somebody's capable of doing out there these days. Doctors and I really appreciate you taking time to join us today. I think our audience is better off for having understood some of these problems that exist in the in the academic world and in the research world and in the real world surrounding, you know, active, active threats. And I'll look forward to seeing more of your work in the future. Thanks. And actually, well, in the process of preparing for this program, I put together some of my thoughts, and I'm going to publish an article about it. So I'll send it to you so that you can then forward it to your listeners. Yeah, we'll link it to this. This video will be public. The recording will be published a little bit later today or tomorrow. And I'll link that to the that recording as well. Okay, thanks. Awesome. Thanks, doctors. And I have a great day.