 Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Bill Burns. I'm delighted to welcome all of you to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. And I'm especially delighted to welcome home to Carnegie Nick Rasmussen, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center. As Nick completes three years as director of NCTC and nearly 30 years of government service, we're very fortunate and very honored that he's chosen to offer a few parting thoughts at the place where his professional journey began, at Carnegie, where he served as an intern now for Junior Fellows Program after graduating from Wesleyan. I've known and admired Nick for many years since the 1990s when we served together in the State Department when Nick worked for Dennis Ross in the Special Middle East Coordinator's Office. Nick went on to serve as one of the very few senior U.S. government officials to serve virtually continuously since 9-11 in fighting terrorism around the world, first at the White House and then at NCTC, where over the last three years, he's led and molded hundreds of colleagues from across 17 different federal agencies into a remarkably strong and cohesive team. At a moment when there's an increasing tendency, I think, to disparage sometimes and to politicize the work of career public servants, I'm especially glad to have the chance to highlight and to honor the public service of Nick Rasmussen because Nick has embodied the very best in government service. So ladies and gentlemen, I hope you'll join me in a warm welcome for Nick Rasmussen. Thank you, Bill, for the warm words and also my thanks to Carnegie Endowment and the Carnegie staff in particular for pulling this event together, making my last public appearance as director of NCTC, but also as a career, last appearance as a career civil servant here at Carnegie seems right to me. My first paying job, as Bill noted, as a national security professional, was as a Carnegie intern, the precursor to what is today's Carnegie Fellow Program. The $12,500 in Carnegie Endowment dollars I made that year, allowed me to live comfortably in my parents' basement in Fairfax City and subsidized my spiffy but very much used Nissan Centra. That was my first grown-up car coming out of college. So closing this particular chapter in my professional career here at Carnegie, as Bill noted, feels like coming home. It's an honor to be here. I wanna spend most of the conversation or the time or the hour we have in conversation with Bill and with you, but I wanted to offer a quick few framing thoughts on a couple of topics maybe to set the stage. First, I'll say something about the connection that exists between what's happening on the ground today in Iraq and Syria and the threat we face from ISIS here at home and around the globe. Second, I'll say a few quick words about the particular terrorism problem that we face here at home inside the United States and how we might do more to deal with that problem. And lastly, I'll offer some final thoughts about CTE counterterrorism more broadly as a national security issue, where it fits in our national security landscape and our hierarchy of concerns. But first, ISIS in Iraq and Syria, which is of course all over the headlines. There's no question but that things on the ground at least when it comes to ISIS in Iraq and Syria are trending well. The effort to shrink the amount of territory that ISIS controls as its so-called physical caliphate, that effort is preceding a pace. The campaign is playing out very much like we had hoped and envisioned that it would. And ISIS has been driven out of most of its urban strongholds and is increasingly finding itself dispersed and isolated and certainly under pressure. For the most part, ISIS now lacks the capacity to command and control and hold territory and exercise state-like functions, taxation, the exploitation of natural resources. The physical safe haven that was enjoyed by ISIS has largely been taken away. ISIS now holds only 11% of the territory that it held at the peak of its expansion in August of 2014. And that's all tremendously good news. But if that's true and it is true, why doesn't it feel that way? Why do we still find ourselves feeling besieged by ISIS threats and the ISIS narrative around the globe? The short answer that I would offer is that those of us in the terrorism world expected it to play out largely this way. We expected that as ISIS was driven out of places like Mosul and Raqqa, that it would adapt itself and it would find new ways to implement the terrorism part of their agenda. And they have the shift to a tax not centrally directed by ISIS leadership in Iraq and Syria. The increased emphasis on efforts to inspire or enable attacks by ISIS supporters far from the conflict zone. The surge in the number of attacks taking place all around the world, lone actors, people acting in very small groups. These are all signs that ISIS has adapted to its more difficult circumstances by changing its operational model and it will continue to adapt. Now for sake of context, let me say this, I'm not trying to take a very good news story that in many ways we're winning on the battlefield against ISIS and turn it into bad news. Not at all, it's not bad news. Stripping away the physical manifestations of the caliphate will have profound implications, positive implications for our threat picture. It just won't happen right away. Over time, ISIS will have fewer resources to support the terrorism agenda. The narrative of success, global success that ISIS propagates, will begin to ring more hollow and will likely begin to appeal to fewer potential adherents in the months and years ahead. But as I said a second ago, those gains are not going to be realized overnight. There's gonna be a significant lag time, I would argue, between the success of the military campaign in Iraq and Syria and the time when we will feel appreciably less threatened by ISIS around the world. I say that not to spread pessimism and dread, but rather to suggest that we still have a ways to go in our counter-ISIS work around the world. There are chapters yet to be written in this campaign, especially as we deal with the array of ISIS branches and less formal networks around the globe. Places like Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, the Philippines, Egypt, Turkey, and perhaps a dozen other countries I could mention if there was enough time. Of course, none of this is comfortable to the policymaker because when the policymaker looks at what we've committed in blood and treasure on the ground in Iraq and Syria, they want results and they want to understand, they want to see an outcome in which our threat condition is somehow softened or eased and it simply isn't there yet in my view. And my second set of thoughts narrows more specifically to the homeland here inside the United States. And unlike my time at the State Department, I spent a lot of time thinking about the homeland and what happens inside the United States. And for the most part, I feel really, really good about the work done over the 16 years since 9-11 in terms of hardening our defenses as a country. I can certainly think of a lot of things that remain to be done. I could rattle through those at great length in the question and answer period. But I think we can say with some confidence that we've made it very difficult, very difficult for a terrorist organization like al-Qaeda or ISIS to penetrate the homeland with a group of operatives. To grow a sleeper cell literally under our nose. Groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda at this point know and understand that we are a difficult target. We are difficult to penetrate. And that's why their focus is on inspiring and mobilizing young people who are already here, people who are already living here in the United States. Now the term of art we use in the counterterrorism community to describe this population is HVE, Homegrown Violent Extremists. And HVEs, Homegrown Violent Extremists, clearly represent the most immediate and the most ubiquitous threat to us here inside the United States on a daily basis. And if you look back at the last half decade, in particular, most of our terrorism problems here inside the United States can be tied to individuals who were either born or raised here or who only became radicalized well after they arrived into the United States. So the challenge we face here at home, I would argue, isn't really a hard edged intelligence challenge of ferreting out sleeper cells that are somehow hiding in our midst. It's really a challenge tied much more to soft power and community engagement. Working with communities here in the United States to give them the tools to counter the rise of extremism inside their own communities. And as I step away from government service in a couple of weeks, I can think I can say with some credibility that we're not doing enough on this score and that we need to do better. And if that sounds like I'm taking a shot at either my former colleagues in any current or former administration, it's really not a shot at any of them at all. I'm being entirely self-critical here because I've occupied senior positions where this set of challenges has fallen to me to contribute solutions. And I don't think I've done a good enough job of contributing to those solutions. And we can talk more in the Q&A if there's any interest, but my bottom line is that the battle to defend ourselves against homegrown violent extremists won't be won by the FBI alone. And we need to make it a lot easier for communities and local leaders to play a role in that effort. Starting in a few weeks when I leave government, I will try to contribute to that objective with my voice from outside government. Now lastly, a few quick words, very quick words about terrorism as a broader national security issue and why it's been the focus of my professional life for every day of the last 16 years. I think most people know that 9-11 had a way of changing most Americans who were of a certain age and I was certainly one of them. But for me, it also set me on a path both personally and professionally that has brought me to this job and then ultimately to the end of my federal government career. And my involvement in that CT mission, that counter-terrorism mission has been the most extraordinary privilege of my career. It's allowed me to work with some of the most talented and dedicated professionals serving anywhere. Not just at NCTC, but as Bill alluded in his introduction, but at places like CIA, FBI, NSA, DoD, Department of Homeland Security, the State Department, the Justice Department, and again, I could name a dozen other organizations. And I often tell my new employees at NCTC that when they're joining NCTC and joining counter-terrorism work, they are now playing the ultimate team sport. Their own success and how well they do at their job will not be predicated on their own good work, but it will also be predicated on the good work done by thousands of others. Partners in the federal government, but also our partners overseas in foreign governments. And certainly our partners here in the United States in the state and local Homeland Security Enterprise with whom we work so closely. And I would argue that that is why CT work is so rewarding. Sharing both the successes and failures with fellow CT counter-terrorism professionals has been one of the highlights of my career. And at the same time, I also know well that terrorism and counter-terrorism do not sit either above or in isolation from broader national security interests or our other national security challenges. These days when I sit in the situation room and I see what Secretary Mattis, Chairman Dunford and Secretary Tillerson are carrying around on their shoulders over and above what's on my plate as a counter-terrorism person, it's really hard for me to fathom how they do it. North Korea, China, Iran, the array of cyber challenges we face, all of that weighs heavily on me even though those responsibilities aren't mine. Terrorism and counter-terrorism will continue to fit into that national security landscape for a long time, but I accept that there are other national security issues which do demand more of our time and more of our resources. But there's still something I would argue pretty unique about terrorism and its ability to drive the agenda for our national security community. Asymmetric attacks are called asymmetric precisely because their impact extends well beyond what rational assessment would suggest they should. So I would argue that that argues for sustained investment in counter-terrorism capabilities in the government, even as other national security priorities begin to take over. I haven't said much about it this afternoon, but our work in counter-terrorism is in fact getting harder and more challenging. So we need to continue to try and hire and train and retain the very, very, very best and brightest of our young people to be counter-terrorism professionals. Yesterday afternoon, I spent about an hour meeting with 11 young people at NCTC who showed up last Monday for their first day of government service as entry-level terrorism analysts at NCTC. I have to say that spending an hour talking to these incredibly smart and brave young people who have joined the CT fight was truly inspiring. They really want nothing more than to be able to serve their country and that made me feel very good about the future. I told them I would be watching and rooting for them from the sidelines in the years ahead and I hope each of you will do the same. So again, Bill, thank you for having me at Carnegie today. It's an honor to be here. Well, Nick, thank you very much. I mean, you've just given us a vivid reminder of why we were also fortunate to have you as the director of NCTC over the past three years and over a professional lifetime of service. I'll get the conversation started with just a couple of questions but I don't wanna monopolize it so I hope you're thinking of your own questions because I'll open it up shortly. But let me just start by, you provided a very good overview, I think, of a lot of the challenges that you've seen over the last 15 years and as we look at the landscape over the decade and a half or so ahead. But as you look back to the period when you first started engaging in CT work just after 9-11, how have your assumptions changed over that period? I mean, what surprised you most as the landscape has shifted over the last 15 years? I guess it would be this. We tended to think of terrorist organizations during the period right after 9-11 as being covert clandestine cell-based movements that could pose a threat to us but they were certainly not mass movements, they certainly were not mass ideologically driven movements. It was about trying to root out small cells of highly capable and highly ideologically committed bad guys who were trying to do us harm and of course, ISIS has changed the model in many ways. ISIS obviously wouldn't win any elections in any country. They are not the majority in any Muslim state or certainly any Muslim community but certainly ISIS opened the door to a mass movement approach to terrorism, almost a crowdsourced approach to terrorism and that requires a different set of tools if we're going to fight back against that particular problem and that's enough of a challenge but that whole other challenge that was already there that we had after 9-11 still sits there. We just added more onto the table, nothing fell off the table in the interim. We are, it frightens me to think that I just talked to you for 10 or 15 minutes and didn't use the words al-Qaeda once and if that somehow suggests that we're not totally focused as a government, totally focused as a counter-terrorism community on the continued work to protect ourselves from al-Qaeda then I've made a mistake in not having part of my remarks. So we keep adding problems to this problem set and at the same time the resource picture as I suggested at the end is destined to get tougher as some of these other issues begin to crowd out the space. Well, just to flip the question a little bit, I mean it's one thing to look sort of backwards at the experience in the last 15 years but as you look out over the next decade and a half what worries you the most? I mean you talked a little bit in your remarks about cyber tools and the way in which the revolution and technology is going to create more vulnerabilities in a lot of ways that extremist terrorist groups, state actors can take advantage of. So are we doing enough do you think at this stage to anticipate those kind of threats and prepare for them? Where should we be focusing more of our attention and resources? It's a good question and I wish I had a pithy concise answer. I think one of the things I've taken away from the last 15 years is the requirement to be to exercise a fair amount of humility in terms of projecting and predicting. You know now when we in the intelligence community look to put out these futures oriented bits of analysis I struggle to take them seriously even in reading them if they extend much beyond the kind of three to five year time horizon because I'm just not sure how useful a conversation that is. What I have challenged our analysts to think about though and to try to contribute to solutions about though is where does this ideological struggle go? We had a conference last fall at NCTC that I commissioned just by asking the question how does it all end? What it was in my mind was not ISIS or Al Qaeda but it, this particular form of extremism largely emanating from Sunni communities but which has taken on different flavors over the past decade, Al Qaeda, ISIS, certainly other regional terrorist groups. And the question has to be not how do you defeat ISIS because if ISIS is defeated then there's probably something else that will pick up the mantle of that struggle probably fed by some regional conflict in some difficult or challenging part of the world and so how do we get at that problem and not just think of it in terms of defeating ISIS or killing bin Laden or winning in Afghanistan because that clearly isn't gonna bring us to the end of this problem. The answer I got back from the analysts after a couple of days of conference making was you're probably on the time horizons you're talking about not going to get that outcome. And so that goes a little bit to my point about sustained investment because this is a problem set that can be managed but a problem set that is not likely to drop off the national security agenda in any reasonable time horizon. The best case outcome as it was described to me from the thoughtful people who were taking a look at this question was atomizing or localizing the problem so that it wasn't a global problem. Reduce it to a series of localized challenges where the grievances were largely local and the answers to those grievances could be driven locally rather than some sort of globally narrative of the sort that ISIS and al-Qaida propagate now. That seems to be, but that doesn't play very well in strategies that emanate from administrations of democratic or Republican. You can't talk about simply holding a problem at bay and get a lot of credit for that. Not a very compelling political argument, no. But how do you look, I'm so geographically, you've talked about the challenge that sort of disorder and continually dysfunction in the Sunni Arab world poses because you're right, I mean, whether it's ISIS or al-Qaida or some other acronym, you're level to see people taking advantage of that. But as you look elsewhere around the world, whether it's in Africa, Southeast Asia, what concerns you the most now? Do you see people taking advantage of dysfunction elsewhere, is it gonna take different forms than we've experienced in the Middle East? I think while it may have a regional manifestation, I think one of the challenges that ISIS has thrust upon us is that the effort against terrorism could end up being pretty borderless pretty quickly. The individuals who are involved in recruiting and inspiring in training, in enabling terrorists don't have to be physically co-located and don't even necessarily need to speak the same language or operate from the same historical frame of reference. So that, to think about it as a regional problem now is a little bit misleading because there almost is no boundary, no way to bound the terrorism problem that we're facing right now. Now that also, I think, gives us certain advantages. We have individuals who are operating in this environment and can be isolated. Individuals who are operating in this environment can be, in a sense, picked off if we can successfully identify them through effective law enforcement and intelligence work. But it's a pretty daunting prospect to think about dealing with something where there simply are no physical barriers or physical boundaries that prevent the flow of information and capability here. And so it leads me not to be optimistic about, as I said, ambitious solutions. I think of this more as a problem to be managed within an acceptable range of costs rather than something else. I think you talked in your opening remarks a little bit about countering violent extremism, CVE, which for more than a decade now has animated a lot of thinking in different parts of the US government. What do you think we've gotten right in that effort? What have we learned that's improved that CVE effort over time? This would be a largely personal perspective because I think everybody comes away from this work with their own sense of what works and what doesn't. I come away feeling, again, a pretty well-developed sense of humility about our ability to engage in this work around the world across the globe. The idea that American thoughts or resources or programs are going to shape outcomes in an urban ghetto of a large Moroccan city or some part of the Sunni heartland in Iraq and Syria I think is a little bit pretentious to think that we would have that impact. So on the other hand, I put all of the weight of the world on our own shoulders for dealing with that problem here inside the United States where we have an obligation, a very positive obligation, I think to be aggressively involved in countering violent extremism work here at home. And it's something I alluded to a little bit in my remarks. The idea being that we need to engage with communities early and often to explain to them what we are seeing, what we know about how extremism takes root. Not with the idea that the problem will be solved from Washington, but with the idea that a informed community has in most cases the tools within it to identify and eventually hopefully divert that person who may be headed down that path. The problem is that makes a great briefing slide, but implementing and executing a program of the kind I just described across the diverse landscape that is America is pretty tough. I do a lot of domestic travel and there are some communities I go into where there's a very, very mature and well-developed conversation going on between the community and law enforcement about how to manage this set of problems. And then in other communities you go to those communities and there's a very hostile conversation going on between law enforcement and the community. And so it's simply not a one-size-fits-all set of solutions. When I go in front of the Congress, we are often asked, how do you know these programs are working? What's our return on our investment? If we double the number of grants that we're giving in this area, is that a good thing? And our answer is we have a hard time measuring success. Metrics, as you know, bedevil all of us in the national security world, measures of success. And this one is probably worse than any in terms of figuring out how did you prevent somebody from doing a bad thing? But when I'm in that setting, I typically argue that regardless of what metrics we can identify, we have an obligation to try and to do this to get better at it. And let's learn from when we screw it up and do it better the next time and if it works three times out of 10 or five times out of 20, then that's okay and that we have an obligation to do this. And we will probably make mistakes along the way. It's a business in which you have to have some risk tolerance because it involves working with individuals who are on the fringe of doing something. So back to your question. I've learned that this is hard and imperfect, but we have no choice but to try to do it better. Well, there's some communities, Nick, as you look across that experience in the US in the last decade and a half, that you think are particularly good examples of what have been the ingredients for their success in those particular instances? The ingredients have tended to be kind of a holistic 360 involvement so that it's not just a conversation for the cops and the FBI, but instead it's a conversation that involves the entire community as broadly defined as you can define it. My kind of snapshot of this when it works well is that there is a conference table in a room somewhere in that city or that community around which sits the police, the emergency management, the federal law enforcement personnel, but also sits educators, faith leaders, housing authority, sports authority, representatives of literally every social service provider or community-like organization you can imagine. And that in the middle of that table is a file and it's a file about one potential individual who may be headed down a path to becoming radicalized and potentially extreme. And the file gets open and the conversation starts, who can do something about this? Who's got a tool? Who can maybe change this person's circumstance, get them out of the housing situation they're in which is making them more vulnerable to this stuff and put them in another situation. Who can make sure that there's a diversion that will get them off of this path? Because the FBI, I can tell you, they're sitting at the table and the last thing they want to do is get to the point where they have to arrest this 18-year-old or this 19-year-old and throw them in jail for 30 years. But if it gets to that point, they will do that. And the community, I think, if they are involved and can understand that there are opportunities pre, before that point, left of that point, that's the ideal scenario I would see. And yet that conversation isn't easy to arrange. I'm sure that's true. Well, thanks, Nick. I promise not to monopolize the conversation. So let me open it up to all of you. All I'd ask is please raise your hand, wait for the microphone to come to you. Please identify yourself. Please be concise and remember to end with a question mark. Yes, sir. Mike's right behind you. Nikolai Zemin, Russian News Agency, Interfax. Sir, could you please comment on current state of cooperation between United States and Russia in fighting terrorism? Thank you. As you can imagine, cooperation with Russian security services is a difficult enterprise. And yet we certainly approach it from a position of trying to identify areas of mutual interest and working where possible to capitalize on those areas of mutual interest. And I should have started first by saying that whenever we have any information with respect to a terrorist threat that may impact on another country, another, not even a, doesn't have to be a partner country, but literally any other country in the world, we will share that information. We take very seriously, and Bill knows this from his time as ambassador, that the duty to warn that we feel is a solemn duty. And so at a minimum, we will always share information that is of relevance to the security of another country. Day in and day out is it possible to have the kind of intimate CT counterterrorism cooperation that we have with many other partners around the world right now? Certainly, I would argue in the current environment, it's not. But there are certainly areas of shared interest where we can identify work that we can do together. Not too long ago, I hosted a set of meetings at my organization with Russian officials who are thinking about securing next year's World Cup games. The United States has a profound interest in making sure that goes well, despite the fact that there isn't a US team involved in the World Cup, we still want it to go well. Small problem. Small problem. But it was important to us that we sit down with them at an early stage and talk to them very seriously about how we have taken steps to secure those type of events when we have them, and set up intelligent sharing mechanisms for sharing what we can with them while they're doing it. So that's a good example of the kind of tangible, but maybe narrow cooperation I think we can engage in with Russians. Thanks very much. Let's see, in the back, yes, sir. Thank you. Michael Trekin with the Department of State Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs. So what do you see is the effective role of US economic diplomacy other than sanctions and trade and development in terms of combating terrorism and violent extremism? And does the American public appreciate and make this a priority for the federal government? You know, I think from my perspective, economic diplomacy, if it can contribute to the creation of a more liberal, representative, democratic order in difficult places around the world, that is a positive contribution. If that diplomacy can help undermine the sources of grievance that feed the narrative that terrorist organizations use in order to recruit young people, then that's a true and real contribution. It is a couple of steps removed from, certainly on the continuum of time, those are investments we make with probably no expectation that they pay off in the near term. And so it's probably hard for most Americans to appreciate how that particular tool connects to keeping ISIS away from Times Square on New Year's Eve. But I would argue there is a connection that's just a long and tenuous one. How about the flip side of that though? You know, what Treasury especially has developed a real capacity for in recent years and that's, you know, squeezing terrorism, financing. What advances have you seen there? What more can we do? I think that that is a tremendous story that has been told but probably not enough appreciated over the last 15 years is we have largely forced terrorist organizations outside of the legitimate economy. Banks, financial institutions know that they will suffer not only massive financial, reputational risk but also massive financial risk if they don't attend to this particular part of their set of responsibilities. They will pay a price and that price is way too high and so they will go overboard in most cases in order to make sure they don't have to pay that price. That's why ISIS was such a challenge for us because when you are a proto-state and you have all of the access to resources that comes with being a proto-state that disrupts the model of counter-terrorist financing that I think we had set into motion and created so effectively under Secretaries of Treasury and the Bush, Obama and now Trump administrations. If they've got their own oil, if they've got their own gas, if they've got their own ability to tax and extort from large populations then nothing we do with this bank or that bank is gonna prevent them from funding what they do. All the more reason why the destruction of the physical caliphate was such a big deal. Even as, as I suggested, it's not gonna pay off tomorrow or next week but it is an essential bit of the business. Thanks. Yes ma'am? Hi, I'm Alex Heffern. I'm a research fellow at Foreign Policy for America. I recently read a story in WIRE that says ISIS or that said ISIS is as much a media conglomerate as they are a terrorist group and I was just wondering if you could speak to the collaboration that you've had with the private sector like Facebook and Twitter or how you see social media responding to the sort of borderless challenges of ISIS. Great question. I think one of the things that has been encouraging to me about the transition from the Obama administration to the Trump administration is that we have carried forward the conversation that started in the last administration and has continued into this administration with the technology sector in order to try to bring vastly greater amounts of information to companies that are finding themselves in a position where their platforms are used by bad guys and so we are sharing much more information, I would argue, with them than we would have been able to a few years ago. Some of that is intentional on our part. We're trying to make them more aware so that they can take their own steps to police their environment. Some of it, as one of my former deputies like to say, is let's guilt them with a little knowledge. Let's put on their shoulders some responsibility for owning their share of this problem. So I would argue that the conversation is a more mature one than it was a couple of years ago. It still has a ways to go. I think there are still instances in which we wish these companies would be more active and proactive in bringing to our attention things happening on their domains that ultimately could lead to real terrorism. Right now the conversation is more one where when we bring something to them of significant concern, they will act. I would like to see it be in a sense of more reciprocal arrangement. And that's not to minimize some of the steps these companies have taken all on their own to police their own domains. As I said, I wanna give credit where credit is due in that regard. The other part of this conversation I would point to is that our European friends are particularly aggressive in this space in talking to the tech companies. American officials, when we sit down and talk to these companies, we always have in mind our own set of principles tied to our own civil liberties framework and the idea that we're not looking to shut off legitimate speech. Some of our European partners are less troubled or burdened or encumbered in that conversation. And so they're sometimes more willing to be more aggressive in talking to companies and saying what they think they should be doing. Yes, sir. Daniel Siebel, research intern with the Missile Defense Project at CSIS. My question for you is with the ongoing debate with the AUMF, it's been criticized heavily for lacking a temporal and geographic limitation. What would you like to see if there was to be a new AUMF to help ensure that we can continue this sort of counter-terrorism fight going forward? You know, that starts to stray into the policy set of questions that could probably get me, if not fired, at least in trouble in my last two weeks. Oh, what the hell? But what I would hope to see is whatever framework emerges to have it be sufficiently flexible that we can account for what I talked about with Ambassador Burns earlier. The fact that even after ISIS is, you know, there may not be an ISIS black flag any longer but some other organization picks up the mantle of Sunni extremism and carries it forward under a different brand or a different name. And we shouldn't necessarily have to go back to the drawing board and thinking about what tools we want to use just because of a rebranding or a new phase in what I described as a longer term struggle. So that unfortunately, that impulse that I just described of maintaining flexibility may sound like asking for open-ended authority to operate around the world using kinetic force. And that's not what I'm arguing for. But I just think there has to be a balance drawn between too tightly circumscribing what we'll do and where we'll do it with some, that has to be balanced against the recognition that we are largely fighting a borderless campaign right now. So that's probably the closest I'll come to offering a view on kind of how it should turn out. I would just argue for being mindful of the need for some flexibility and not shutting off our capacity to respond quickly if a new theater emerges that puts us in a bind. Lay in the back. Thank you. Jeff Selden with Voice of America. Wondering what your reaction is and perhaps what advice you've been given to other government agencies now that the president has officially recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and there's been a lot coming out from terrorist groups, Islamic State, Al-Qaeda responding to that. How is that changing the threat picture? Is there a benefit in the long term to the U.S.? My particular role is, and I would argue my colleagues in the intelligence community, our role is limited to spelling out with as much precision and care as possible our assessments of what particular courses of action will lead to in terms of threat. And I can certainly say that in the case of this particular policy decision, that was done. It's also hard, I find very hard to project and predict with precision if A then B with something as complex and complicated as steps related to Jerusalem or any steps related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So I think there's no doubt, but that in the short term, the near term, there will be an increase in violence and that we are at greater risk in certain places around the world, certainly from a diplomatic security perspective. Our men and women serving in difficult spots overseas, this will add to the security problem and added security complexity. I can't tell you how long that will extend. I can't tell you on what horizon that will take place, but certainly we know in the near term the security environment in big chunks of the Middle East will be more complicated. In terms of the impact longer term on the prospects for stability or progress in the Israeli-Palestinian conversation, there are people far more expert than me these days to form an opinion on that topic. Thanks. Please. Hi, Ted Mormon, Independent. Based on your experience and observations, what have you observed to be some of the primary precursors in the formation and growth of terrorist organizations, the catalyst to new organizations forming and kind of rapidly growing those organizations? I think two kind of easy obvious ones, I'm not telling anybody anything too profound here is regional conflict and sectarian tension. When you blend sectarian tension and regional conflict, then you can almost guarantee yourself some degree of some terrorist movement emerging or becoming active. That, of course, leads to conversations inside the government all the time of, okay, how do we get to those underlying conditions? How do we solve regional conflict? How do we address sectarian tension? And, of course, that is a much harder problem than simply destroying a terrorist organization or rooting out a particular terrorist cell. And this is another area where I've probably grown more humble over time in terms of the way we as a government articulate strategies and for dealing with these problems. I can remember being part of strategy writing exercises in the 2003, four, five period that said all of the things we were going to do to make Yemen really successful as a state. And here we are 14 years later still struggling with a disintegrating Yemen, which serves as an incubator for a terrorist organization and a safe haven for a terrorist organization that has been at the top of our worry list for most of the last 16 years. So I just identified a problem and then I don't think there's much of a solution to it. I've grown, as I said, more adopted more humility about our ability to truly produce the kind of outcomes that would lead to successful resolution of those regional conflicts. That's why I think my sense of strategy about counterterrorism these days is more limited to managing a problem so that it doesn't become a game changer politically, economically, socially for the United States. And if that can be achieved, then I think that is success the way I define it. Yes, sir. Again, I'm gonna stick pretty closely to my prescribed role as a senior intelligence officer, professional, whatever you wanna call it. In two weeks you could go crazy. But I, sorry, exactly, go crazy. I mean, I think we certainly continue to look at Iran as being one of the foremost, one of the most aggressive sponsors of terrorist activity across the Middle East. And so certainly the kinds of resources that have been flowing into conflict-ridden parts of the Middle East, Yemen being a very good example, do nothing to bring stability and do everything to add to the instability and add to the level of death and destruction ongoing in a place like Yemen right now. So we continue from an intelligence perspective to try to isolate and highlight those bits of information that allow us to say, aha, we can talk, we can document, we can prove it, we can talk about it so that we can, in a sense, arm ourselves diplomatically to have those kinds of conversations that say, we know what you're doing and it needs to stop. Or to organize international pressure more effectively than we are sometimes able when we can't paint that picture. So I think from an intelligence perspective, that's what we focus on. Let's try to develop the clearest possible picture, not just in terms of words and rhetoric, but in terms of actual, tangible examples of how Iranian support for extremist movements around the Middle East is, in fact, undermining stability. I don't know that I've seen any particular inflection point from the conclusion of the jikpo that tells me that that problem is worse or better. I don't know that the infusion of resources available to the Iranian regime has somehow made them dramatically more capable of the kinds of influence and contributions to instability that they're making in these places are not always measured in money or in billions or millions of dollars. Relatively small sums of money, relatively small infusions of equipment or personnel can add a lot to a regional conflict. So I don't necessarily know that I look at it as tied directly to the jikpo. Yes, sir. Sydney Friedberg, Breaking Defense. To follow up on Iran, you focused mostly for various reasons today on Sunni extremism that is non-state, although in the case of ISIS, became a quasi-state. Iran's sort of operating at the other end of the spectrum. It's definitely a nation state, very old and highly civilized one, that has moved down the spectrum of conflict to use terrorism in some cases as a tool. To some degree, the North Koreans do this. Russians like to assassinate people. It's not quite terrorism. How is Iran as a model of state-sponsored terrorism different as a challenge from these more amorphous bottom-up networks in the Sunni side? It's a good question, and I think the primary difference is that with pure terrorist organizations, Al-Qaeda, ISIS, it's not like we have any kind of ability or reason to have any dialogue at all with those organizations. There is no dialogue to be had. So therefore, the terrorism part of the problem with Al-Qaeda is 100% of the problem. And so there's simply not space to try to reach some kind of understanding that would take that tool off the table. On the other hand, what we know about Iranian state sponsorship, a list of terrorism, sits alongside a whole lot of other things we know about Iran and a whole lot of other things that we engage with the Iranian regime either directly or indirectly about over the last couple of decades. And so that would argue to me that there is at least space for a conversation about how to use one of those one of those vectors in order to influence other of those vectors. I will leave it to others, far more expert about the Jikoha, including people on the podium here, to talk about how we would view that particular set of that particular problematic Iranian behavior as alongside other Iranian problematic behavior. But at least there is trade space there when you have the ability to talk about one as against another. With Al-Qaeda, there simply isn't, there's no conversation to be had. There's nothing that could be put on the table as either a carrot or a stick that would change the way in which we engage with Al-Qaeda. The toolkit should theoretically be more full of things that we could potentially do about the problem in dealing with a state actor. Absolutely, they bring all the resources of a state and that of course means it's difficult to strangle the resource flow that goes to terrorist organizations. Thanks. In the back. Judy Carson, retired Foreign Service. Would you talk about the vulnerabilities in our immigration laws and what measures you would take to stop illicit facilitation networks, the human smugglers and traffickers from taking advantage of our loopholes? I'll probably speak a little more narrowly than your question gets at because I've gotten very, very deeply involved in this question over the last year and a half of my time at NCTC. Our role at NCTC and in the intelligence community is not to decide what the threshold should be or not to decide what numbers of immigrants or what numbers of refugees should be allowed into the country. What our role is though is to provide the best possible input into a decision making process that is led by the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security and that input that we provide is an intelligence community input that says here is everything we could know conceivably do know about an individual who is seeking to enter the United States. What do we know about their past associations? What do we know about their potential connection to a terrorist organization? What do we know about their historical ties to anybody else that may be of concern to us? That is an input and I would argue it is an important but entirely imperfect input. A lot of times what we do in writing that information is saying we don't know if that person has any of these ties and is that a sufficiently positive view to make a positive decision to allow a person to enter the country or is the lack of derogatory information simply not enough to allow a person to be admitted into the country. I would argue that those are not intelligence questions to be answered, those are policy questions to be answered and they should be answered on the basis of risk tolerance. How much risk are we willing to accept as a society for allowing certain populations into the United States as measured against the demonstrated benefit that those admissions would allow us and I would hope we could move to a more mature and responsible conversation about risk versus gain rather than a conversation that is focused solely on preventing, blocking, stopping. Because I think over time it would be a healthier outcome if we could understand better risk versus gain on a more evidence-based basis. Thanks, yes, sir. Hi, Jim Bullock, retired Foreign Service. Going back to your metaphor on the conference table where everybody could take a piece of the problem, you're talking about collecting information on the piece of this effort which is putting out information. There are a lot of players in that operation. Do you have any parting observations about is it properly resourced, targeted, structured? What could we, should we, will we be doing in the area of active measures and active messaging going out as opposed to just intel collecting on the way in? This is one of the areas where I was trying to be a little bit self-critical because I think we could do more to resource these kind of outreach efforts particularly here inside the United States. I have a set of officers at NCTC who work in this particular space who are amazing professionals. They know this terrain extremely well. They go into communities all around the country, sit down and have very intense, often very emotional conversations about extremism and what extremism looks like when it's happening in your neighborhood. And I could have them on the road 52 weeks a year because there's literally not a community across the country where there wouldn't be some benefit to this. And so my point in mentioning it earlier is we are not really operating at scale in order to have these kinds of conversations. And it's not enough simply to kind of ship out and print and ship out a bunch of pamphlets and say leave these on the front table by the exit of the community center and hope that people, you know, pick them up and read them and decide, oh, now I know what I need to know about extremism. We do that. We have a lot of products that we push out. One of the things that's been in a huge evolution of the intelligence community during my tenure is we write and publish now much more for an unclassified audience trying to be able to share particularly on homeland terrorism issues, trying to find ways to share information with local law enforcement who don't have security clearances and who aren't members of the intelligence or the National Security Committee. Our contribution to them is to put something in a form where it's actually useful to them. And so we do a lot of that but it has to be supplemented with a lot of also face-to-face human engagement. And that's the part I don't think we've resourced yet to the point we need to. We're down to our last question. Yes, sir. People, okay. Retired DOE and State Department. I just wanted to follow up on the last question because I think it really is a place where the conversation inside government and between government and civil society is always going to be difficult. And that is, as you were talking about the group of people sitting around the table, as I remember it from government, there was always a certain law enforcement flavor or bias or many of the agencies and many of the federal roles involved came from one flavor or another of law enforcement. And yet sometimes the people you're trying to reach in the communities out there are not necessarily going to be, law enforcement may not be the best entry point. Yes. And I wonder how do we think about building a better two-way dialogue between intelligence and law enforcement professionals and counterparts in entirely soft civil roles so that information can flow back and forth and perhaps you can get to the point where a file that you didn't know about ends up on the table and ends up being discussed. One of the frustrating things about this particular set of problems in terms of our homeland terrorism problem is how many fits and starts we've had bureaucratically about how to organize this. And a lot of that goes to the question Steve just raised. If you put too much of a law enforcement flavor behind this, it stifles the conversation and quickly makes it an us versus them conversation. On the other hand, that is where most of the expertise inside our government resides is in the law enforcement and the intelligence community. So what we've tried to do is make this bureaucratically part of a broader homeland security and resilience conversation rather than simply where are the terrorists in your community conversation. But that means you are taking a long time to get to the point sometimes. You are having to broaden the conversation out in a way where it doesn't seem sometimes all that coherent. We wanna sit down and have an all threats conversation with this community. All threats being everything from environmental terrorists to street gangs, to domestic terrorism here in the United States. And you can quickly lose coherence and muddle the message if you're in that space. So I think we are still in a trial and error phase. I think my Department of Homeland Security colleagues have begun the process of putting a coordinator for this set of programs, these set of issues in each major metropolitan area. And that's a start because that person can become a funneling point for community outreach outward but also community inquiries coming inward. And I wish we had more to say about what we've done than just that, but to me it's a positive start. Unfortunately though, it will end up also looking very different in every community in which you do it. What will work in Denver will not work necessarily in Los Angeles or Atlanta or New York or Chicago. And so I don't think we've cracked the code yet on how to have a palered, structured civil society conversation in each city that works. We have models that work but they don't seem to be replicatable. Thanks Nick. I hate to bring really interesting conversations to a close, but Nick, it's been wonderful to welcome you home to Carnegie. I wanna thank you on all of our behalf, not just for your thoughtfulness over the past hour but for your extraordinary public service over the last three years. So please join me in thanking Nick Rentson. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.