 Let us take our seats. I'm Charlie Allen. I'm the senior intelligence advisor to intelligence and national security alliance. And it's my great pleasure to introduce the next panel. The intelligence community receives oversight primarily from two select committees, as well as its authorizations for funding, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. A close relationship between the director of national intelligence and the IC agencies, and these oversight committees is imperative if the United States is to counter threats to its national security. It is our privilege to have two distinguished members from those committees with us here today. Chairman Mike Rogers represents the people in the 8th district of Michigan and the U.S. House of Representatives, who's done this since 2000. His experiences as U.S. Army officer and FBI agent, a businessman and a representative of the Michigan State Senate, and U.S. Congress provides him with a unique perspective on the security needs of our nation and the role of the intelligence community. He has worked hard to strengthen the intelligence community and is noted in Congress for his efforts to fight global terrorism. The Speaker of the House appointed Congressman Rogers to the chair of the HIPSE for the 112th Congress because of his experience and his reputation on national security issues. I think we can safely say that Chairman Rogers always brings great energy and passion to this position. We're also honored to have with us Senator Mark Warner, who was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2008 to represent the people of the Commonwealth of Virginia. His experience and record as a successful businessman and as governor of Virginia prepared him well for the challenges of Washington. He has quickly established himself as a national leader on fiscal and security issues and one who is willing to reach across the aisle to find common sense solutions to the challenges facing our country. Senator Warner is an advocate for a strong intelligence community and recognizes that it faces some tough decisions in an era of budget austerity. He also has a good fortune to have a significant portion of the intelligence community actually located in Virginia. Our moderator for this discussion is Kim Dozier from the Associated Press. Kim is a successful, highly acclaimed journalist who has won countless awards for excellence in reporting. She has covered counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and now the intelligence community. While covering the war in Iraq in 2006, she was critically wounded in a bomb attack in Baghdad that killed an American soldier, an Iraqi translator, and two of her media colleagues. Her book, Breathing Fire, Fighting to Report and Survive the War in Iraq, is a courageous and deeply moving account of her recovery. She, as you might expect, is a staunch advocate and supporter of combat-injured soldiers and their families. Ladies and gentlemen, over to the panel. Thank you, Charlie, for that introduction, and I want to thank INSA and CSIS for giving me this opportunity to grill you guys on stage about 9-11, the 10th anniversary, and what comes next. Now I'm gonna start with a freebie. Gonna ask you both to give me a report card. What have we done well? Where are we lagging? Are Americans safer than they were 10 years ago? Chairman, start with you. Thank you. I'm shy in Dumeur, Kim Dozier. I'd like to see that person come out maybe today a little bit on stage. And I mean that in the best possible way. First of all, thank you for the opportunity to be here. And I would argue we are safer, but it's maybe not for the reasons we think. Terrorism has changed as much as the intelligence community has changed in the last 10 years. We have clearly been much more aggressive about putting analysts forward and integrating analysts into the action side of intelligence in a way that we had never done before. We've applied technology to our intelligence profession in a way that had not been done before. You mean drones, but you won't say it. We've applied technology in a way that we have not done before. And a whole aspect of it, how we analyze information, how we collect information, and then get the right kinds of information to the right kind of analysts, all of that has happened over the last 10 years. And because of that, and because I think America is more aware of the threat, we are in fact safer. And we've done a great job on the core of Al-Qaeda, but there is plenty of work left. And again, we're safe not because the problem has gone away. We are safe because we have risen to the challenge in the community to defeat it. And our awareness is much more, I think, acute than it was 10 years ago. Senator Warner? Well, I would agree with Chairman Rogers on the overall frame. And let me first of all, acknowledge on the front end as the kind of new guy on the intel community, I'm still in that learning process. And I try to mention I am very glad that we've got a lot of that, the IC community and government contractor supporters in Virginia. I've tried to get out to see about a dozen of those agencies so far. So my perspective on how we have improved as much comes from my tenure as governor is my activities at the federal level. I've seen in Virginia where we were first state to set up a cabinet level, Homeland Security Advisor, where we were one of the first states to set up a fusion center, where we worked closely with our private sector infrastructure to try to do appropriate mapping. So I would say we've made progress there. I've also seen where we've not quite made as much progress. I remember I think most every governor's in the first few years after 9-11, I got sworn in three months after 9-11 when we had the initial flood of Homeland Security Dollars and every local fire department wanted their own hazmat unit no matter where they might be and still sorting through that process. I think we've done a bit better there but I think there's still work to be done in terms of how we distribute funds. At the same time I would argue we saw better, we've seen better information sharing on the domestic side but I'll still remember those 20 plus days when this whole region was terrorized by the snipers and for most of that timeframe the expectation or the sense was that this was not just some rogue-loan wolf but might have been a terrorist incident and I can assure you from someone who saw that up close and personal, there was still a lack of collaboration and coordination amongst law enforcement. I think again we've made progress. I would agree with the chairman on the international side that we, both the technology and analytics are much better. I think we do see new threats though. I think one of the biggest new challenges that we have by no means gotten right yet is the, are the challenges around cyber and as we kind of think through moving to the cloud and some of the other technology advances are we gonna have the intel side chasing the technology advances or are we gonna be able to get that kind of meshed as we move forward? I think that's very much an open question. Let's talk about tracking a terror suspect then versus now. They don't face Posse Comitatis. They don't face some of the border issues that we do when a terror suspect crosses from CIA territory into FBI territory, so to speak. How are we doing on that? And the larger issue is the intelligence when you put it into an all-source intelligence network, when you put it into some form of analysis and you've got that pot versus the pot back here. How are we doing on mixing and sorting that? I think we're doing better. It's not perfect. You know, one of the things about the FBI and CIA relationship, a lot of it after 9-11 was blamed on a cultural problem. And to some degree that's true, but the culture was bred through legal hurdles that were also in place. When you had grand jury testimony, even if it was very specific, it was almost impossible to take that grand jury testimony from an FBI case and transfer it to a CIA officer to use in any capability. So they had legal hurdles that I think fed the culture of the differences between the CIA and the FBI. Much of that is gone. You still have the personality differences that happen in any organization. I don't care what it is. That still happens, but it has diminished. And through good leadership, I think from both the agency and the FBI, they've been able to mitigate a lot of that. So now when you have somebody that you're, in your words, tracking, that may be trying to enter the United States, that flow of that information is much easier and it's much more seamless. And an analyst in the FBI or an agent in the FBI will have as much access to that information as a case officer or an analyst at Langley might have on that piece of information. I would simply add that I think that kind of physical collaboration at the National Counterterrorism Center is a step in that direction too to make sure that information is appropriately shared. And yet I hear one of the things that happens is this, you all talk about this blizzard of information that people get their reports, they get their analysis, some of it's pretty redundant. They all hang it out there on their various computer portals so somebody else can see it, but that there's a lot of overlap and that it's just too much to digest and there still remain walls to putting it all into some artificial intelligence system to sort it out. But I don't think that is a intel only problem. I think you could, I think one of the challenges as we kind of sort through the debt and deficit issues is the over-reporting over a number of policy goals and objectives that most government agencies have and this kind of sifting through this blizzard of information. Obviously it's even higher priority in the EIC to get it right, but this is a government-wide problem. I will say there are efforts underway on that particular front to find the right IT technology that will help sift through the information and one of the real problems today is the sheer volume of information to get through to get to the right place. And I think we are closer to that than we were even a year and a half ago and it will have some fits and starts but I think it will dramatically and exponentially increase the value of information that an analyst pulls down that allows them to come to the right conclusion either for targeting or policy formation or their conclusion on what their thoughts are on a particular region or a particular person. Are we six months away, a year away? So it's just since I've started covering this be a year and a half ago, I hear about it all the time and I wonder, okay guys, you've known about this for some time and I know there are computer systems out there, various different competing ones that could address it but every single system designer says to me, ah, but there are these legal issues that we can't put these pots of information together. Well, and there are, there is some of that and we're gonna get through it but I think you solve this in pieces and then we're gonna take the system. So it'll be more of a pilot project in a place that we know we can contain the legal issues in a certain set of information and then we will take that and extend it beyond that. It's not gonna be instantaneous and if you talk to any IT person, this is one of those million dollar problems to solve. It is difficult and you have to get the right qualifiers in the right place to have a good outcome and that is a huge challenge for programmers to get to that place. I think we're getting there. I think you'll see a pilot program, as I said, within the agencies where we can contain it and then we'll get to the sharing part later. Let me just, let me add one other thing here too. That, again, is the new guy, one of the concerns I've had is not only the question came you asked about how we make sure that the various agencies who collect the intel and share it appropriately, but I've had a real question. It's not been fully answered, but better than I expected about how the IC is starting to use more of the open source information. We have not only all of the various agencies that collect but then this huge open source issues with social networking and other tools that frankly didn't even exist three or four years ago in many cases. And some of the conversations I've had actually shows I think that the IC is further along on the open source issue than I expected them to be. That leads to the next question of what this means to Americans and their personal privacy. How are we doing on balancing that? A poll this week found that 54% of Americans still want the US to err on the side of protecting their personal privacy. What would be your message to them? Grow up or... This is the right way to guard our values by protecting their privacy. I mean, the premise of the question I think is wrong. I don't believe that you fundamentally have to sacrifice your civil liberties and still have full and robust collection of information. There are protections under the law. I have to say I thought the Patriot Act was the most mischaracterized and misunderstood piece of legislation I have ever seen. And when you would ask the people, including folks from the ACLU who's I'm sure intentions were pure, about show us the place where you say that your rights are violated and the Fourth Amendment protection is circumvented and they can't find it. They cannot find it, it is not there. So a lot of this was perception. Many of us, I took an oath to the Constitution, both as an FBI agent and as an Army officer and as a member of Congress to protect the Constitution. I think you can do that and still have a robust collection apparatus. I don't think they have to be mutually exclusive. I would say, and yet my colleagues at the AP, Matapuzzo and Adam Goldman did a story on the NYPD's cooperation with the CIA. And one of the things that they do is look at communities where terrorists have come from in the past and targeted folks in those communities who've broken the law and asked them to inform. Does this disturb you? I think that there are, this is again an area where the notion that we're going to legislate some bright line on one side. I don't think you can get there. I do think that generally speaking, through a very challenging time, we've kind of got the balance right. I think the times I would drill down on whether that the poll that you cited was more about people having their civil liberties and competed in terms of government listening in or other type of things or whether it was a question of the kind of just changes in lifestyle based upon security concern. I saw some of the reference to the poll, but I wasn't sure what it was really measuring. This is a really important question, and I think the rhetoric in these cases can get ahead of what the details and the facts are of the case. I saw in the article that there was some cooperation with the CIA. They did have a former CIA employee working in the unit. That does not automatically denote that there was some collusion between the CIA and this particular intelligence unit. It means that they did employ someone who was formally employed by the CIA. They also had former FBI agents who had left the FBI also working in the unit. And this to me is critically important. I am adamantly opposed to racial profiling. I think it doesn't work, but there are things called criminal profiles that do work, and if you're going to catch an Irish mob bank robbery crew in Charleston, Boston, you're normally gonna show up at places where the Irish connection folks would hang out. I mean that's a, in the FBI we used to say that's a clue. That's a good place to start. So you're gonna go to Murphy's Bar? You're gonna go to Murphy's Bar and you're gonna talk to a whole bunch of people with Irish last names, and some that not. But that's a good place to start. And it doesn't mean you're targeting individuals, and I thought that language was pretty harsh. It does not mean that. Great example in another, you do a bank robbery. The first thing you do is canvas a neighbor. This is old fashioned police work. And you knock on the door and you ask Sally May, the neighbor, did you see anything? That person isn't targeted by law enforcement. They happen to be maybe a material witness, or maybe they have information. And the only way to do that is to show up. So some notion that they were targeting these groups because they thought everyone was a criminal, I think is absurd. And it would be an incredible waste of their time. But what they did do, is my understanding. And a thorough review of this is fine. I'm for that, I think it's a good idea. Is use that kind of criminal profiling to say, we have information on these five people, and here's where these five people are going and attending and socializing. And we better get a handle in trying to understand it because it's an intelligence-based investigation. Much like we do with organized crime or drug groups fill in the blank, you have those certain criminal profiles and their patterns of life will be very similar. So as an investigator, it's logical that you would try to find those patterns of life of people you know, doesn't mean everybody's there, is a bad person or guilty, but it sure means that's a good place to start to ask some questions. We've been talking about targeting the enemy here. Let's move to overseas. The evolution of how we have targeted terrorist networks over the past 10 years. You could say we started small scale with the special operations and CIA-led campaign in Afghanistan. Sorry, for those in the crowd who want me to flip that. CIA-led and special operations program in Afghanistan. We moved on to full-scale invasion, Iraq, much larger troop presence in Afghanistan. Now, it appears we're going the other way. What do you think is going to be the effective way to fight in the future? What do you think of the White House's counterterrorism strategy as it's been articulated, which seems to be a combination, special operations raids, intelligence covert operations on the ground, and perhaps what they call the white side of special operations, the Green Berets, training local forces, and now Marine special operations, even SEALs, training local forces, how to fight terrorists as well. Well, I would actually think we've seen this process, as you say, start small, go big. The jury is still out on whether the go big strategy has necessarily proven truly effective. I think when we're fighting a different kind of enemy that is not a nation state, you're going to need to use units trained for that, and some of the concerns about the militarization of the CIA and so forth. I think the changing nature of the enemy, some of that is, again, perhaps over politicized, over rot. So I think there is the White House's approach in an area that's still evolving, is a better direction now than it was when the notion that we could simply go in and go big against the terrorist network and not create the kind of residual almost recruitment efforts that we saw, for example, in Afghanistan or in Iraq, when it was so disruptive for the local population. So, you know, is it perfect? Absolutely not. But, and this is going to be something that is going to continue to evolve. And I do believe that this needs to be a fight that we continue to try to frame friends and allies as well to make this, not just America alone in these circumstances. I think there's a danger in politics for, especially in the gray area, and it's gray only because so much of it's classified and not transparent to the public, that the last big event that was successful becomes the strategy for your future. I think that is a dangerous place to be. You're talking about the raid against Osama bin Laden? Well, I mean, just by your statement of what you articulated the administration's policy to be. Well, you can tell me if you think I'm wrong, too. Well, in a way, I just wrong. There are, you should have every tool available to you in this fight. And every region of the world and every country and every terrorist group, and there will be new ones, and so you'll have al-Qaeda that has no nation state to worry about. You have a country like Iran that I think is a growing state sponsor of terrorism, and I think they're getting more bold and more brave in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and other places. And the kinds of thing that that brings to the fight on terror, and what it means to US security interests. And you're still going to have other terrorist elements and we should lay out the FARC is hurt but not gone. All of these groups have different strategies you need to lay at their feet. And when you looked at the Afghanistan, you had a government that was in absolute support of an organization that developed, planned, recruited, financed and ultimately attacked the United States. And by the way, the President of the United States at that time, George W. Bush said, give them up or we're coming in. And they said, come on in, the water's fine. And so I don't know what other tactic you could have used and you can't just use special forces and CIA operations because one of them worked. It won't translate into every region of the country. So I think it's dangerous to say this is the new counterterrorism strategy for the United States. It should be a part of it, but we should also leave everything else on the table as well. The devil's advocate would say if we'd taken out Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda's initial training camp at Karnak Farms, it could have headed off a lot of this. Woulda coulda shoulda. If we had gotten him in Africa, remember the 90s, we closed down wholesale CIA operations in Africa. He was operating in Africa. We didn't know it. Why didn't we know it? Because we didn't have any intelligence people there to tell us that he was there. And so if we hadn't cut in the 90s, we could have gotten Osama bin Laden in Africa and we wouldn't have this problem, right? I mean, we find ourselves in the fight that we're in, not the fight that we want to be in. And there's a lot of near misses along the way in that, that we're, I mean, Torah Bora would have been great if we were that close. If we'd have had him in Torah Bora, it would have been a different day. We didn't get him. And no military operation, I don't care if it's title 10 or title 50, goes exactly the way you planned it, including by the way, the UBL rate, didn't go exactly the way it was planned, right? That is the fundamental rule of these operations is, once you plan it, it probably won't look much like that when you're doing it. But there is, we need to leave all these tools, but the notion that there's not lessons learned from... Tools including full-scale invasion. Listen, I remember when the invasion of Afghanistan, it really was in that case at the start in, the world versus a rogue state. Unfortunately, it is through the process, and I've supported when we first went in, supported what the president has continued there. But we see ourselves, the coalition of the willing continuing to shrink down. And if we don't recognize a lesson from Iraq or a lesson from Afghanistan about how and when we use that full-scale invasion force in terms of what it means after you take out, the top echelon of the bad guys, what are you gonna do then? I think that has to be factored in as we go forward because these kind of conflicts are gonna continue to arise all around the world. Before we move on to this, pass a little questions. You mentioned the cuts in the 90s, and you have been a key participant on some of the budget committees on the top debates right now on how to reduce the deficit. So you're both at the center of this particular storm. You got another round of major cuts coming, aimed at the intelligence community as well as everyone else. How are you going to keep it from being like the cuts in the 90s? I mean, I know INSA did a paper called Smart Change where they said, don't just lop off 10% like you did last time. That led to things like hiring freezes that robbed of us new analysts, et cetera. So what's your magic solution? Well, my magic, there is no magic solution other than the fact that we've seen the IC budget basically in the last decade approximately doubled to about $80 billion top line. There has to be a recognition that that kind of rate of growth can't be sustained. I would argue, as Admiral Mullen has it, the single biggest threat to our country is not terrorism, but is this overhang of debt and deficit that will completely undermine our country's ability to stay the nation or the world's leading power. And I don't think anything can be left off the table. I do think the traditional political approach of let's just come in and lop a percentage here and there is a ridiculous way to run any enterprise of this size. I've had a number of meetings with DNI Clapper about the notion of can we, and it's harder in the IC, but can you look at performance? Can you look at metrics? Can you look at ways that don't just come in with a percentage cut but try to find savings? As somebody who, again, new to the community, as I try to sort through, at least on a top line, all of the various agencies, organizations, and overlap, and I know there needs to be, and the IC more than most areas, overlap to put those checks and balances, but we seem to have, in certain cases, overlap and extremists right now. And how do you make the office of the DNI not just another bureaucratic layer but really that place that helps sort through these issues? I think that is a real challenge, but I do think performance metrics, trying to ensure the way you can bring about operational efficiencies, that's gotta happen in every piece of government. We passed a little piece of legislation last year that nobody's ever heard of called the Gipper bill that actually requires every agency to only have two or three policy goals to eliminate certain reporting requirements, to identify the top-performing programs and the least-performing programs, first time ever you actually identify the least-performing programs. Now, within the realm, the IC, it's tougher to do those things, but the notion that because the community is secret and this information can't be shared, that it is somehow gonna be spared, some of the cuts I think is short-sighted. I just wanna, listen, we've just gone through this. There's the O12, Intelligence Authorization Bill will be voted on hopefully Friday this week in the house. So we have spent the last six to seven months painstakingly going over every line item. And I think any organization that grows that fast can get a little fat in a hurry. However, that being said, some of that was making up for the fact that we didn't have a presence in a continent like Africa that I felt met our national security interests. So we had to make up for some of that. We had to reconfigure the FBI went through major changes and a lot of it very expensive changes. So all of that I think had to happen. I do believe that the rate of growth, again, I think we all agree on that, is unsustainable. So what we did is we went through and we saw, and I don't think the DNI can do this, frankly. I don't think that the community can do this. I think the authorization committees have to do this. This is why we're there, why we have the clearance, why we get to see everything, and why we have to make these decisions. You're the bad guys. Well, I think we're the good guys at the end of the day, right? Thanks. We have found significant savings, but it won't fit that across the board percentage. It's not gonna fit that, but we have found significant savings by merging programs, merging services, merging things that will not impact the mission of the intelligence community to actually collect and protect the United States. So it is very comprehensive. It's the first time we went through line by line on the military intelligence program and the national intelligence program with a fine tooth comb. So I think the product, and it was a bipartisan vote in the committee. Matter of fact, when we made the agreement was a couple of weeks ago, Dutch Rupert Berger and I were in the basement of the intelligence committee. We shook hands on the deal and five minutes later the whole building started shaking. I thought we broke something pretty bad. Thank God it was the earthquake. But once that I think gets rolled out, it will allow the DNI to help manage those changes because some of those changes are gonna be hard. You have to give up a little bit. And merging services and training facilities and other things, some of that's gonna be hard, but it has to happen if we're gonna sustain the amount of spending I think we need to have the kind of quality intelligence we need everywhere in the world. Let me just, one thing and this shows that I've always been an executive longer than I've been a legislator. I do think obviously the role of the oversight committees is critical in this. But I think we miss a bet if we don't force the agencies themselves to come forward with their own recommendations of what is working the best and what's working the least. The one thing I've always found in government is it's always easy to start a program. It's virtually impossible to force anybody inside government to actually be willing to self-identify what's not working. And it doesn't mean we have to take that as full guidance, but it is something that I think we need to demand across the board. And my point, I think we're saying the same thing. That isn't gonna happen if we don't make them do it. They're not gonna do it on their own and I think our ability to see all, and look into all of the silos gives us a very unique perspective to say we're gonna take that silo and merge it with this silo and quite frankly the managers of each of those silos didn't even know they existed. And that happens in the intelligence community, it just does by nature, by compartmentalization, by turf. And so I think the body to do that, that would function in this case as the CEO on the budget capability, not the management side, has to set out the standards and say, you're gonna have to change, here's your parameters, come back and tell us how that's working out. But we need to keep the management at least involved in making some decisions. They were completely engaged in all of the aspects of the bill and two things we said. One is it's gonna happen and be a part of the solution. You need to come forward and help us do this in a way that won't impact your mission, but saves this much money. And I think it's worked very, very well. But what's interesting to me is that you both seem to describe the DNI as the great persuader, as opposed to the person who makes this happen and the power then, and the responsibility falls to the APPROPE's committees to hammer home these cuts and choose some of the cuts. Well, on the authorization, Intel is very different than the other authorization committees because we were very detailed specific. So they could go below those numbers, they can't go above those numbers. So when that bill becomes law, it is they just need to fill in the gaps. So one of the things we did this year to try to get around that problem is I brought on for the first time appropriators, gave them appropriate clearances to sit on the committee so that we could bridge that gap before we got to the actual passage of the authorization so that you don't have this game of the authorization committee does one thing, the appropriations does another and the agencies work both sides against the middle and I love them, but they're trained to do this and they're very good. We spent a lot of money making them really good at this stuff and by God they are. So this is one way that we just said, hey listen, we think this, if we're gonna play the management role on the money side, this is a way for us to do that and get the outcome and I think Mark and I both wanna have happen in Intel. Now I'm gonna kick off with some questions from the crowd starting with Fran and by the way, John Brennan is en route but he's a little bit late which means I get more time with both of you. Oh, look at the time. Yeah. We've gotta go make law. Yeah, exactly. So kicking off with Fran's question, what's the likelihood of that bandwidth for first responders bill that's pending before Congress, is it gonna pass? I mean, and this is a great question and the earthquake brought it up again the other day. Look at this moment, I'm out for this. This is the guy from the industry. Back in my space. Yeah, exactly. Was I not supposed to out you Fran? No, no, no. It is an important question. It is, this is what we do with the D block. Let me first of all say, if we're looking for an area to both have the federal government make a little bit of money, create jobs and where we are unfortunately far behind most of the industrial world, it is allocating additional spectrum. And the first responder bill that has passed the Commerce Committee, it's got great goals and I supported the Rockefeller Hutchinson approach on it. I do worry that in the first responder community, I can assure you it's easier to get Democrats and Republicans to work together than it is to get first responder radio engineers to work together and the approach we're taking is giving them a very big block of spectrum and then they are gonna have the expectation that the federal government is going to not only fund its construction but its long-term operation. That is at least times a challenging question. I think first responders need a truly interoperable system. I would urge they need to have some skin in the game. They've got other spectrum that they could give up. We've got to make sure that we've got states and others helping build out these systems. Whether, I think the bill that we passed has some chance of getting through the Senate. I think there are some folks who've raised some questions in the House, I'd ask. Mike, to make the House comment. The goal is the right one. I just wanna make sure we don't pass something that's gonna end up being a white elephant and costing us billions and billions of dollars downstream because we didn't set up the appropriate financing mechanism on the front end. Yeah, I think it's exactly right. The only thing we didn't find and that we presented lots of opportunity, we missed the coalition of the willing amongst the first responders to help us put this together. There's gotta be a lot of debate on D-Block and what happens and does it go to auction and then leased back and all of those questions we're going through right now. I think there was a lot of inefficiencies in the money that we gave first responders around the country to fix this problem. Everybody wanted their own system or their own fire truck or their command center and it was, I think, a misfortunate expenditure of taxpayers' money that didn't get us to where we need to be which is a fully interoperable radio communication system. So we learn from that lesson. I think the house is fairly close to the Senate position on this that we're going to try to work out some of the details on who takes ownership and at the end of the day where the money flows to the D-Block section and how best we increase the motivation, is that a polite way of putting that, for these locals to get together on their radio communication system. It's the only way it's gonna work, I think. And then spectrum sharing is there's a lot of things that have changed technology-wise in the last four or five years that need to be factored into this debate. Now, moving on to the threat we face now. Great question from the audience in light of the fact that all the top counter-terrorism officials I've spoken to have said the major threat for 9-11 is lone wolf attacks, not the organized large-scale plots. They don't know of any of those in existence right now by Al Qaeda. So this question is, why is the number of homegrown terror cases accelerating? And there's this uptick in lone wolf attacks. And is it one of the greatest single threats facing law enforcement in American cities? Well, I can't say it's the single greatest threat. I mean, we still have the rise of gang violence and organized criminal activity in especially urban centers that I think poses a much greater risk to life and property. However, that being said, it is a huge problem and the cost of terrorism, if you could put a cost on, it's just a horrible way to look at this, but if you have property crime in a community that you're managing versus a terrorist act on the inside, the economics of that are way out of whack. The terrorism event is much more significant economically. But from a violence perspective, I think that's their first priority. And second is this lone wolf problem, which is why New York is doing the kinds of things that it's doing. I will tell you this. And I think it's a mistake for the IC community to say that these are separate and unrelated events, lone wolf, al-Qaeda, other terrorist groups, AQIM, AQAP, and somehow it's not related. What we have seen is a change in tactics on behalf of the affiliates. And remember, the affiliates are, some of them are relatively new to the al-Qaeda network. And that was all done by design and it was led by Osama bin Laden himself. And it had clear benefits to the al-Qaeda core, if you will. But the tactics, and there was, one of the things I found interesting in the materials that came out of the UBL compound was the debate that they had amongst themselves about changing the tactics in the fight. And UBL was very American-centered. He wanted a big event around an anniversary to happen whatever anniversary it was. This one was of particular interest to him, obviously, because he knew it was gonna be important to us. But the other factions that are not splinter groups, I've heard them describe the splinter groups, they are equal partners in AQ itself, but they have different tactics they're bringing to the table and the greatest example of that is Alaki. So when you have a, is it a lone wolf if he is radicalized, recruited, and directed by somebody who is trying to encourage that individual to operate? And I would argue, no, if I recruit you in the United States, I radicalize you in the United States, I finance you and give you some direction in the United States versus I recruit you and fill in the blank, Pakistan, and I train you and radicalize you and equip you and strap you with a bomb and put you on an airplane to blow up over the United States, what's the difference? I argue there is no difference. I think the challenge is, and the difference from intelligence in a law enforcement capability is, how do you disrupt and attack like that? It's much easier for us to do it overseas than it is here, but that really is the only difference in it. So yes, it's a threat. Yes, we worry about somebody grabbing a gun and going down someplace and doing something waffle, but they'll never just do that. In all the cases you have seen, there are indicators leading up to that particular event. They were radicalized in order to get there. Senator? I would simply, I think what Mike said is accurate. In a certain sense, I have been amazed that we've not seen more lone wolf or quasi-lone wolf-affiliated attacks. Again, I go back to just a personal experience in terms of the sniper shooting. Two guys driving around in a beat up car terrorized 10 million people for three weeks. And one of the things that I think we, the president has said, not a comfortable topic to talk about, but how we plan as a community to be resilient if and when, because it is probably going to be more when than if. We have some incident like that, and I think there are lessons we can learn from the UK and other places that we need to start sensitizing the American public for, because God willing, not on anything around the anniversary this weekend, but at some time there will be other incidents and trying to gauge an appropriate reaction is something that I don't, again, I don't think the American public's ready for. Well, luckily for you both, the next panelists are here. So I want to thank Insta and CSIS for having us. Thank you both for allowing me to interrupt you so many times, and thank you all very much. Thank you. Thank you.