 It's a wonderful panel to discuss some of the lessons learned from the fight against ISIS and what the future of terrorism might look like. Obviously we had a very lethal terrorist attack in Cyril Lanka from an ISIS affiliate just earlier this week. So it's unfortunately a very relevant discussion. Leading this discussion will be Karen Greenberg, a long-term friend of New America, who runs the center on national security at Fordham University. She also edits the Fordham's extremely good national security brief, which comes every morning, which I recommend you subscribe to. It's a little bit depressing every day, but it is probably, I think, the best roundup of national security news in English. Karen is the editor or author of multiple books. She's one of the world's leading experts on Guantanamo. She's also one of the world's leading experts on kind of the way the Department of Justice has approached counterterrorism and I'll turn it over to her. Thank you very much, Peter. We are in for a wonderfully exciting discussion here. But first, if you could turn your attention to the television screens on either side, you have to take a poll. And so I'm going to give you the question and then tell you what to do. So the question is, in 2030, how many U.S. troops will be operating on the ground in Syria and Iraq? And this is how to text it. You text FUT, SEC, F-O-R-U-M, FUTSEC Forum 2019 to 22333. And here are the answers. A is zero. B is 1 to 500. C is 500 to 5,000. And D is over 5,000. Again, you text it to 22333. Your answers are anonymous. And the question, I'll repeat it one time. In 2030, how many U.S. troops will be operating on the ground in Syria and Iraq? That's a tough question, I think. And I'm going to give you 30 seconds to answer and then we're going to go forward. Data's flowing in. If it were an easier question, we would only give it 15 seconds. Okay, good. We're going to move on. So this panel is convened to look at what the threat of ISIS is, how to think about ISIS going forward, how to think about terrorism and counter-terrorism in the future. And I don't think we could have a better group of panelists to talk to you about this. I'm going to introduce them very briefly, but let me just start by saying, as you know from reading the press, there's been some concern about whether there is a sense that ISIS is over, that somehow taking away the caliphate has meant the end of ISIS. There's been an awful lot of pushback on this from experts in government and outside of government, mostly outside, I think, that ISIS's message is very strong, that it's turned into a messaging organization of some sophistication and of incredible breadth. Peter mentioned the morning brief. There's an article in the brief this morning from the Atlantic about this. And I recommend that all of you look to it about just how ISIS retrenched, thought about or didn't think about, but reacted to the demise of the caliphate and what this meant and how many people this messaging is estimated to be reaching. And so we'll talk about all of that, but I just wanted to set it up. You have ample bios of each one of these people, so I will, they're going to speak in order, and I'm going to begin by introducing all of them, and then Jen will begin. Jen Easterly, currently global head of Morgan Stanley Cyber Security Fusion Center. Before that, she was special assistant to the president and former senior director for CT at the NSC. You're going to hear that a lot, director of NSC here. Josh Gelzer next to her, to her left, executive director now of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, where he's also visiting professor at Georgetown. Formerly he was senior director for CT at the NSC and before that deputy legal advisor there. To his left, Colonel Christopher Costa now has this great new job as head of the International Spy Museum, which I encourage you all to visit when it's relaunched. He was senior director for counter-terrorism at the NSC at the beginning of this administration and special assistant to the president. And finally, Nick Rasmussen now senior director of the McCain Institute's counter-terrorism program at ASU here in Washington, D.C. and before that director, as you know, of the National Counter-Terrorism Center and before that many, many things, which you can read about in the program. So, you know, because we have them all here, I wanted Jen to start by talking about her role but also about what the NSC is, what it does, how it functions and the way she had to think about taking what she learned from her predecessors and reformulating in a way that was focused, how she thought about the criteria for her strategy and just talk generally about that in two minutes. Thank you. It's really a pleasure to be here. I'm encouraged that we put CT on the agenda for this future security conference because I think one of the themes you'll hear from us is CT will always be part of the national security sort of considerations. It's great to be here and I think there's a key theme here in terms of the non-partisan nature of counter-terrorism. We have three senior directors for CT across three administrations, which I think shows you that this really is the purview of professionals and not a political activity, which I think is good news. Just briefly, in terms of the job of the senior director for counter-terrorism on the National Security Council staff, so our job essentially is to coordinate and develop global counter-terrorism policy and strategy. All of us also chaired what's called the CSG or the Counter-Terrorism Security Group, which is composed of all the CT heads across the interagency, so NCTC, the heads of CT, it's CIA, FBI, NSA, Justice, State, Treasury, Department of Homeland Security, and again working together to build policy that gets teed up to the Deputy's Committee, the Principal's Committee, into the President ultimately to make policy and strategy. So I think that as a baseline is important. I think another thing that we can sort of talk our way through here is words do matter. This panel is called Defeating ISIS Lessons We Can Take From That. We spent a lot of time walking through what words we wanted to use, whether it was defeat or destroy or dismantle or deny or disrupt or all kinds of verbs that actually have significant implications from a resource perspective and from an expectations perspective, and I know we'll talk a little bit about that. But as I thought about what are the key lessons learned, some of it accrues to this idea of having somebody within the White House who is actually driving counter-terrorism policy and strategy and helping to set priorities, and I think that is incredibly important and needs to be extensible across any administration, and I'm sure Chris is going to talk a little bit about that. When you think about the trajectory of what we did in the Obama administration in the second term, I think some starting points you need to talk your way through is what Nick produced when he was a senior director, which was the national strategy for CT in 2011, right after the death of Osama bin Laden, which was very, and I think rightfully so, very focused on al-Qaeda and then all the tools that we used to be able to counter the terrorist threat. And one thing that you'll see is it's not rocket science. There's sort of a set of tools that are used across all administrations and really at the end of the day it's calibrating to how you assess the threat and the effects that you want to have again going back to whatever D word you want to use. And so when I came in in 2013, we had the national strategy for CT. We also had sort of a characterization that came out of a speech that President Obama gave at the National Defense University that was rolling out what was the presidential policy guidance to focus on our framework for enabling lethal action. And interestingly, the threat there was described as lethal but less capable al-Qaeda affiliates, threats to embassies, remember this was after Benghazi and businesses, and then homegrown, violent extremists. And I think in retrospect we probably didn't get that right. You know, we were very focused on we've damaged al-Qaeda in this way, but we sort of missed the growth of ISIS and we can talk our way through that. But when I came in 2013, it was very much focused on al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the embassy threat that had happened that summer, the movement of what we called al-Qaeda veterans, also called the Khorasan group from AFPAC area to Syria, so we were worried about the development of what was al-Nusra and really is al-Qaeda in Syria. And certainly we're watching ISIS in January taking over Ramadi and Fallujah but we're not seeing that necessarily as our primary focus area. So when ISIS ended up taking over Mosul in June, it really forced us to sort of recalibrate the threat as we knew it and then try and figure out the right strategy and policy that we needed to put in place. And I always felt a little bit that we were in the effort to try and calibrate the right effects we wanted to have and not to over-rotate because of course at one point in time we had hundreds of thousands of troops in Iraq but to ensure that we were focused on, in some cases, sort of minimum footprint, minimum force. And so the first strategy that we worked on was of course the strategy to counter ISIS in Iraq and Syria, very, very focused on that part of the world. And it was not a public strategy but you can go ahead and look at the White House fact sheet which walks through what we call the nine lines which is your CT toolkit, essentially effective governance so working from a diplomatic perspective, denying ISIS territory, using lethal force, capacity building, enhancing ISIS collection, disrupting their finances, disrupting their ideology, providing humanitarian support and protecting the homeland. Again, it's all of those effects that you want to have but calibrated to that threat. And then as we started to implement that, then we were seeing attacks around the world. So it was the development of the caliphate and all these provinces, eight of them officially and many others unofficially. And so we spent 2015 coming up with the strategy to counter ISIS's global expansion and then towards the end of that year you had San Bernardino and the worries around inspired and we see that today in Sri Lanka as Peter alluded to, inspire terrorism. And so we were constantly trying to figure out how to get the strategy right and calibrate it so that we weren't over-rotating from a resource and expectations perspective but that we were actually trying to have an effect on the threat environment. I think we ended up getting that right but it was a bit of push and pull with the entire policy community. In terms of the lessons learned just broadly, again, I think leadership, having a disciplined policy process absolutely matters. I think making sure that you're calibrating the capabilities and the partnerships. We had a lot of focus on that in the Obama administration and we can talk through that now. And then this threat, frankly, that's pulled from the early days when Nick was a director for counter-terrorism and I was working as the executive assistant to Condoleezza Rice in the Bush administration. This idea that Tom Cain talked about in the 9-11 commission of the failure of imagination and I think that is something that we all need to continue to take away because ISIS is not defeated. The idea of ISIS is not defeated. Their physical caliphate may in fact be defeated and we should applaud that but the idea continues and we see it again in Sri Lanka and attacks around the world and so we need to continue to make that a priority but obviously calibrate the resources and the expectations against how we assess the threat to be. Josh, let's talk a little bit about this failure of imagination which is another way of saying how much do we know, how much do we not know and the balance between being preventive and being reactive and how it all kind of falls into the same, your guys jobs. Basically you're responsible for all of that and so take us forward a little bit to the cyber realm and the cyber threat but if you could just sort of talk about that a little bit, it would be good. That sounds great Karen and it is really a treat to get to be up here with you. Karen is a great thought leader in the field and with three people who have been just incredibly kind mentors to me in government and friends ever since so it's really nice to get to be here and have this conversation especially with this great group and I will pick up in some ways where Jen brought the story and to go to Karen's point one thing that I think we did try to use some imagination and get ahead of the curve on was among the more notable distinctive characteristics of ISIS. There were multiple, the physical territory being obviously one of them but the group's ability to use the internet, to use social media, file upload sites and reach out in various ways globally through the internet, through apps on folks' phones was clearly not only driving what they were already doing because it was part of their battlefield tactics, it helped scare away what might otherwise have been Iraqi army and even civilian resistance to them and rolled into places like Mosul but it played an even broader role broader in the sense of at the level of strategy, broader in the geographic sense as well. So this was clearly something happening not just on battlefields where the government might try through partnerships or directly to push back but it was happening on the private sector and its platforms it was happening on YouTube and Twitter and on Facebook and that meant we had to think about it differently and those folks were not in the meetings that Jen was talking about before and it was clear that we needed to get out of our comfort zone and away from only the tools represented by the bodies that show up at those meetings diplomatic authorities, law enforcement authorities, intelligence community authorities and try to get help and empower but also get help from those outside government. So real quickly, three ways in which I think we tried to build structural devices and then a word on where it's gone since but on January 8, 2016 the White House announced three things all the same day all designed to be different manifestations of creativity thrown at this problem set. One was that Dennis McDonough, the Chief of Staff to President Obama and Lisa Monaco, the President's top counter-terrorism advisor had jointly hosted a meeting and they'd taken most of the National Security Cabinet with them and gone from Washington out to California and met with the leaders of tech companies and said we don't agree on some things right now and encryption was one of those things they didn't agree on but we can find some other things that we do agree on and this was especially in the wake of San Bernardino which really had been a bit of a jolt to the national consciousness on this issue and had a productive beginning to a conversation about ways in which the government and the tech sector could do more and perhaps learn from each other on these issues we can come back to some of what has flowed from that really important moment in the conversation but the same day the government also announced that they were going to look at domestically how to empower actors better to push back on ISIS's messaging and abroad the domestic manifestation was something called the countering violent extremism task force it was housed at the Department of Homeland Security it had interagency representation from across the government and the theory of the case was the government isn't going to be the best actor at knowing who in the community is going down a path of radicalization or how to turn that person away from it but the government can provide resources, research, empower those in the community who can similar theory of the case was behind the Global Engagement Center which was at the State Department and you're in State Department authorities here so you're focused on audiences abroad at this point we could see that audiences abroad and audiences at home were at least in some tiny proportion of all those who ISIS is trying to reach some of them were going to respond to that call, that call to violence and this was a way to try to in a sense inoculate audiences from responding from letting vulnerable individuals be dragged down a path of radicalization now we can talk about where those structures have gone I think they've had their ups and their downs bureaucratically resource wise since then but my point is really that that was an attempt to have that imagination and to say if this is where ISIS is going, if this is where terrorism is going because these are actors that learn from each other once ISIS puts out slicker online magazines and videos that look more like teasers for Hollywood movies Al Qaeda will do the same, other groups will do the same and they did this was a way to be creative and try to empower actors outside the government to help in the fight for the threat is now real quickly I think we've seen ISIS in particular complicate how it uses the online space so then we had a couple of paradigms in mind we had the idea of end-to-end encryption facilitating attacks among operatives folks who already were very much ISIS but who wanted to coordinate an attack without intelligence community or law enforcement detection then we had the idea of reaching a mass audience Twitter, YouTube, trying to share their message globally very cheaply and then we had the idea of taking individuals who responded to that call and leading them maybe in smaller settings encrypted conversations down a path of individual radicalization and violence I think ISIS has taken those paradigms and complicated that whole spectrum they do more with the internet now than they did then they receive things, they receive pledges of loyalty they inspire individuals who then can find materials at the tactical level and figure out what they themselves want to do with that inspiration where, when, what sort of attacks they want to launch and as we try to figure out what happened in Sri Lanka they even seem to be able to link up with what are at one point locally oriented terrorist groups and bring them into the ISIS fold which can be done in a whole host of ways, formal and informal so in the years since I think we've seen ISIS complicate and add to what it can do to weaponize the internet and I think we need to continue to have that imagination to keep up with it or better yet get ahead of it Thank you So Chris, let's talk a little bit about what Jen and Josh handed over for you to take over and we'd love to get your take on just how counterterrorism played in the early days I know you've written some about this in terms of the other national security equities that were fighting for attention how you see that conversation at the beginning of this administration and where you think it is now in terms of and I'm going to come back to this for all of you afterwards but in terms of how to assess the ISIS threat now where do you place it in the national security framework Thanks for the question Karen and thanks for the opportunity to speak on this panel with colleagues and friends and that's the first point I want to make the fact that we are colleagues and friends sends a little bit about our community so first right up front I came in on inauguration day and I like to articulate on day one we had some day one problems and those problems were in four bends if you will first we had a significant threat to commercial aviation secondly we had to make a decision on a raid or not to conduct a raid against Al Qaeda and the Arabian Peninsula and third we recognized there had been some great work done on ISIS but we were going to accelerate the campaign we were going to ramp it up as quickly as practicable and the last point I want to make is all of us worked on hostage issues we don't talk a lot about that but we had American hostages being held in Africa we had hostages in the Middle East and we had hostages in South Asia so those were day one problems but let me dial back a little bit from my predecessors from Jen and Josh and Nick was already in place at the NCTC but what I inherited was an excellent process they had an excellent reputation they left me thick binders filled with information but I only had four hours with Jen and I listened for four hours and as we've said in different forums I don't think we took a break and that was problematic for me but that's another discussion there was a staying arc of continuity on counter-terrorism issues between administrations and that's a key point some people don't like to hear that but that's a fact there was a continuity counter-terrorism professionals working on counter-terrorism problems we didn't have an updated counter-terrorism strategy and we began working on that along with those day one problems we started working the day two problems which meant we needed new strategic framework for counter-terrorism built cumulatively from our predecessors and it had to be it had to be supported by the intelligence that we were seeing so that's what the team went to work on and that happened really weeks into the administration and it lasted long after I had left nine months I think after I had left before the counter-terrorism policy was published the national counter-terrorism strategy I should say better put was published and I think it's an excellent document it does a very good job I think attacking a new threat picture in other words looking at ISIS Al Qaeda was no longer the threat we had new technologies that we hadn't necessarily addressed in some of our public documents and we attacked those vectors and we made it very public again after I had left the administration but I think implicit in that document is this very idea that we're also dealing with grey zone dynamics and we're trying to get our arms around what that means and I think it is a lucid document but it's although it's the Trump counter-terrorism strategy I think what's important to note again I'll use the word cumulative it's built on past strategies and I should also emphasize another point I want to make I think we all recognize that we have to continue the counter-terrorism pressure not to put Nick you know on the spot here I've heard him utter those words over and over again in interagency meetings all of us echoed that which is a euphemism for militarized approaches to direct action that has to be coupled with the things that you just heard from Josh and Jen we recognize that I think it's a good balanced strategy so that's how the beginning of the administration shaped and then the other part of your question Karen take a little water goes back to another thesis that I have that the counter-terrorism enterprise is in a very good place what I worry about is an over-correction that other policy considerations eventually will make CT less important particularly the further we get away from 9-11 and that's what I worry about so at every chance I have to articulate my concerns my biggest concern is what I call an over-correction and I didn't see it while I was certainly at the NSC but I worry again as we get further and further away from 9-11 and we don't have knock on wood a catastrophic attack then we can focus on other more important policy initiatives and that is a central concern I have so my last point is the CT enterprise is solid it's on good footing don't mess with it streamline it but allow it to exist because we were part of that enterprise and we're just the tip of the iceberg the whole interagency is behind this and I think it's in a very good place and it's a model of how the government should operate in other spheres but I'll just stop there thank you so Nick you're gonna you have the wise man view of years and years thinking about this problem being in the right place at the right time when so many of the wrong things happen and I'd like you to give us our thoughts a little bit on in terms of a failure of imagination do you worry about future failures of imagination in terms of our CT strategy being in the right place are we in the right place are there things that should have been attended to attended to in the past that weren't appended to that keep you up at night sure and again batting cleanup in this lineup there's a lot to draw on Karen's questions in the course of the comments of my friends and colleagues here if I'm thinking of the kind of a theme or a take away that I've developed over my period of time working in and around counter-terrorism strategy it's a theme that centers around the word the words that Jen threw around a few minutes ago the words that we tend to populate our strategies with whether they were in the Bush administration the Obama administration and now in the Trump administration the words matter as Jen said and we often set for ourselves very ambitious objectives which even if we were maximally resourced even if everything broke our way in the international environment with every positive projection of the international environment that you could develop came true we still would have struggled to meet those objectives on the kind of timeline that we were setting for ourselves so what's the antidote to that is not to stop trying you don't stop trying but I guess my take away from that is that when we set objectives and we set strategy we ought to be more realistic we ought to be more candid more bounded in our setting of expectations because to Chris's point I think if any one of us were sitting here and briefing a new president in two years, four years, eight years whenever that may be that man or woman will be sitting down and being given a serious introduction into whatever the threat environment is that we face at that moment and that counter-terrorism enterprise that apparatus that that Chris described will be at the disposal of that president and that threat may have shifted up or down by some degree of 10-15% one way or the other but my guess is it will look largely like the threat environment we face today plus or minus and so as a strategy as a matter of strategy that argues more for words like manage, contain suppress, control cope resilience is obviously an end state objective in that environment now of course strategies are both policy documents that are also political documents and the words I just used do not soar rhetorically they sound like you are going to the doctor in a sense but I would argue unless someone smarter than I can paint a picture where some of what Josh described in terms of the ISIS narrative is defeated somehow then I don't see how we are out of this business as it were in the near term and so at the same time though to Chris's point we are in an environment where a whole set of other national security challenges have raced their way up the ladder and demanded attention and anybody who was a counter-terrorism person or expert would not sit here and tell you that any of those are any less deserving of the policy resource intelligence, military, all of our toolkit attention needs to be devoted to those issues too but we will be as I said playing in this environment, this counter-terrorism environment from now through this presidency the next presidency and I would argue the presidency beyond that so the challenge in my mind is how do you sustain the investment we have made not dismantle the capability that we have acquired do so, try to do that while creating some efficiencies and that puts a great deal of challenge upon all of the individuals who are our successors I told Joe McGuire who took over my position as the director of the national counter-terrorism center that he had a much tougher job than I because he was going to have to do everything that I did probably some additional things beyond what I did but in a resource constrained environment and for much of the post-911 period those of us in the counter-terrorism world were not resource constrained I think that's the gentle way to put it and now trade-offs will have to be made trade-offs in the intelligence community trade-off in our deployed force around the world trade-offs across literally every one of our elements of our toolkit and that's going to be the art and the science for our successors at the White House and the national security council staff is making intelligent trade-offs and not leaving ourselves vulnerable to surprise due to failure of imagination and I'll stop there Karen so I'm going to ask each one of you a question and then we'll turn it over to your questions and that is if you were called in and they said to you look we just want one tool that you think we should really focus on would it be and I don't know if it would be your unplugged but is there a is there one thing that you would say look whatever else you do here's something that might not be on your list that I think you should pay attention to it may be a little out of the ordinary but what is it so well since you brought it up because what you're what you're referring to not really a tool because I think you know I suspect that we would all be hard-pressed to give you one tool it can't just be lethal action you know I think partnerships there's all kinds of things what Karen was referring to is you know try and deal with this whole idea about trying to think out of the box if you will about threats and tools that we could use to be traditional we you know I mentioned we shared this group called the counter-terrorism security group and we had a lot of meetings sometimes four or five a week but once a month or so we would do something called CSG which came to be known as CSG unplugged from the MTV unplugged but it was just getting together the really smart CT professionals across the interagency and thinking in an unconstrained way about things that we could do to deal with the threat environment and I found that to be actually you know a really useful exercise a lot of fun as well but it was again trying to force yourself to think in new ways about that threat to deal with this whole idea of the power of imagination and we had some good ideas that came out of that actually that we ended up implementing and so again just goes back to the theme of you have to be able to sort of think expansively of the threat to get ahead of it and then acknowledging the resource world that you live in to be able to calibrate the tools that you have against the threat that you assess Josh. So I'll take this in a somewhat different direction and it's a tool that it's not going to solve the problem but it can make the problem a lot worse if it's misused and that's the bully pulpit frankly you had from the Bush administration into the Obama administration a lot of care in how the president talked about terrorism and whether that terrorism was al-Qaeda, ISIS or at times things happening on US soil that we call domestic terrorism even though that label has its problems I think you actually saw to Chris's point earlier a lot of continuity and presidents who tried to distinguish bad acts and bad actors from whole groups of people and again using that pulpit correctly it can build resilience it can help explain to the public what they should and shouldn't fear it's not going to solve the problem but if you don't handle the bully pulpit correctly it can make it a lot worse and to my mind you see some of that making it worse right now and you see after something like a Christ church attack for the president of the United States to indicate that one brand of violent extremism is just a few folks and it's not a real problem it to me feeds into a narrative that is growing and it goes back to my point earlier about how the internet connects people good but also sometimes bad you have ISIS's spokesperson come out after Christ church and say look Muslims of the world if western governments can't protect you can't even acknowledge that you are the victims of a terrorist act like this you need to understand that's why we're here we can protect you and so the bully pulpit is a tool that I would like to see us return to using a lot a lot more wisely interesting so I told you what my day one problems were but I came in to the white house intending to work on counter ideology counter radicalization I just did not have the luxury to work on those efforts as much as I would have liked to so now I can do that a little bit at the spy museum and what I've done is reached out to former terrorists and have them speak credible voices telling their story the evil of their ways if you will in their words and I think that's very important to do those kinds of things and we have a lot of former terrorists that are going to be released in the united states we talked about that number I don't know what it is maybe under 30 or so but they're going to be released from prison what they do with their time after that is very important to the nation and hopefully what they do is use credible voices and go out and speak against the kind of radicalization that we see so I think those are some important efforts I wish I had focused more on counter radicalization quite candidly so credible voices is an important program and should be adopted if not by the government by non-profits should take that on absolutely so you've probably picked up on the fact that because we span a whole number of years of working across the counterterrorism enterprise there is some pride that we each feel for kind of what has been built over time and Chris articulated it most clearly but if I had to come in and brief somebody new and say where do things need to be re-architected where do things really need to be looked at with a fresh eye I would go to this area that Josh just alluded to what we are I will call just for ease of conversation domestic terrorism because the enterprise that we described having so much pride in is very towards an international terrorism threat and I was just thinking to myself and I've articulated this in some other settings with Josh in recent months when if I an event like the tree of life synagogue massacre or something like that happens in the United States we largely look to the FBI to fix the problem in the aftermath using their law enforcement tools we don't necessarily think about bringing our entire counterterrorism status together to figure out what is the next step about getting ahead of this threat and that's by no means exact opposite of a criticism of the FBI the FBI is the preeminent law enforcement organization in the world in my mind but they should not be left on their own to deal with domestic terror as simply a matter of law enforcement and I give great credit to Chris and the team at the White House that put together the emergent document CT from the Trump administration it did include language about addressing domestic terrorism threats but now of course we need to see will that actually be executed and implemented will that actually be resourced will structures that we inherited and that we refined actually be turned in the direction of dealing with this problem as well as the problems of ISIS and al-Qaeda and groups like that operating overseas it's a huge challenge for the counterterrorism community that we've now stepped away from but it's one that I hope they embrace because if you're not dealing with that problem here at home we're not living up to our obligation to the American people to keep them safe time for your questions there'll be a roving mic and we're going to go over a little because we started ten minutes late so over here thank you very much for sharing your thoughts with us given the fact that Abu Bakra Baghdadi just appeared in a new video which was released today in coincidence or not coincidence with what happened in Sri Lanka a couple of days ago what should be the most urgent response from the US and that would be a question to all of you to what looks like kind of a revitalization of ISIS given the fact that the leader is now for the first time after five years I think appearing in the video thank you it's interesting that this issue came up because we actually had a conversation in the green room before this about okay, pause it for a moment that we were to find out that Abu Bakr had been killed in a kinetic strike in Iraq in the last 24 hours would that change the way we collectively look at the threat picture and our answer in a nutshell was not really certainly not in the near term because all of that which we described over the last 35-40 minutes would still pertain. We still would very much be confronting an ideological narrative that still finds resonance across conflict zones all across the world does that mean we should place any less of a priority on going after the leadership hierarchy of ISIS whether that's on the ground in Iraq and Syria or in other conflict zones of course not because that's a key piece of dismantling or degrading an organization but it is not a cure all and it still leaves us very much in the business of having to confront the ideological challenge around the world. The only thing I'd add to that was sort of off the back of what Josh described in terms of the relationships we tried to forge with the tech community to prevent ISIS from having a platform for recruitment and radicalization. I do think we made some strides I don't think it's enough when we can still have these videos proliferate across the internet when they can still be used to inspire and keep alive the idea of ISIS and the caliphate I think we have a lot more work to do and I realize it's a difficult thing now being back in cyber but I think that is an effort that we need to continue to work with the tech community. Peter. Picking up on what Nick said about domestic terrorism is there a need for a domestic terrorism statute of course there are all the sort of first amendment problems but the release of this Coast Guard who had accumulated huge arsenal weapons was planning to seems like kill CNN and MSNBC anchors and democratic politicians he was let out of jail on Thursday now if you've been in any way affiliated with ISIS presumably still be in detention so is there a need for a domestic terrorism statute notwithstanding that there are some first amendment issues in that question. One lawyer on the panel. Peter asked the question that Karen and I were having a lively discussion about before and that Nick and I have written about with another former colleague of ours Mary McCord and my short answer is I do think there's value in that I do think there's value in a statute that would make terrorism itself a federal crime it's funny we call it a domestic terrorism statute it would actually apply to any terror you could use it against jihadist too I would take the definition that's currently in the US code and make a crime of it now right now of course those who commit acts that we all recognize as being domestic terrorism they generally get prosecuted either for other federal charges like using a weapon of mass destruction something like that or they get prosecuted under under state charges so some people say what's the gap it seems to me that there are practical gaps and this issue the pre-trial release has at least pointed at one but there's just a moral gap there too these acts are politically motivated violence and it seems to me civilized society has at home and ideally abroad taken that and said that's unacceptable you don't use violence to pursue political aims you can use all sorts of other tactics but not violence and to make that clear that that's true whether you're inspired by ISIS or whether you're inspired by white supremacist rhetoric and messaging that seems to me of some moral value that doesn't mean we replicate exactly the legislation we have for foreign terrorist organizations at the domestic level which would have all sorts of legal complications associated with it it does mean you build in all sorts of oversight to ensure that this sort of statute wouldn't be used actually for a government that wanted to crack down on groups that they just dislike there are ways to build it I think that would be sensitive to the distinctive nature of what happens here at home and the way in which politics and what we call terrorism can at least be abused by those who'd want to exploit that but the short answer to my mind Peter is there's room for something to be done there one more question over here thank you very much amazing panel I would like to focus my question on the United States so in the United States upholding radical views falls under the first amendment so what mechanisms and processes can you put in place to avoid well to let the individual uphold his radical views but without never reaching that tipping point that would make him fall from radicalization into mobilization that's a hard one I mean I'll start with just one thing that I remember hearing about with Jen in the early days of some of those from America being drawn towards joining ISIS as foreign fighters which is you had FBI truly going to families to parents and saying look we see your child from what they're doing online from what other sources are telling us going down this road of radicalization and at some point they're going to cross the threshold into committing a federal crime they're going to conspire or attempt to provide themselves as material support to a foreign terrorist organization and we're going to do what we're supposed to do what we as FBI are charged to do which is work with the prosecutor the Justice Department and stop them ideally from getting on that plane or pick up and they're going to serve a long time in prison we'd really rather you talk them out of it now and too often I think that attempt at an intervention didn't succeed and FBI then did what it is its job to do which is stop people from committing federal crimes including that provision of oneself to a terrorist group but I think an ideal world and this is part of what we tried to build with some of the structures I talked about before before the person crosses that threshold into criminal activity to empower communities to turn them away to intervene and that's not what folks at FBI signed up to do to put 16 and 17 year olds who've been seduced by the the terrorist messaging of a group half way around the world that's not really what they wanted to get at but ultimately when that threshold is crossed that is their job now it's sort of one of the things we tried to build with the CV task force that Josh talked about that was set up in January 8th 2016 and I think that effort has now fallen apart so that's a place where I think deserves greater focus there's a sweet spot here there is not going to be a federalized response that is going to create the kind of community intervention model that's going to do exactly what Josh described on the other hand the federal government can and should be a catalyst a provider of resources a curator of best practices and do that in a way that doesn't suggest that they're only there to collect intelligence and look for the next arrest that they can make I would argue that we still haven't found that sweet spot we're trying very hard at the tail end of the Obama administration but even then our best efforts were sometimes met with suspicion and outright hostility by some of the communities that we wanted to work more closely with I would say on the congressional side be a little tolerant of failure in this regard you know give the executive branch credit for trying and maybe perhaps live with a little bit less than a perfect return on investment because this is hard stuff but in my mind if you succeed one out of three or one out of four times at that kind of conversation that Josh just described that's one person you don't have to put away for 50 or 60 years or ruin their life by putting them into the judicial system and I wouldn't underestimate some of the progress that has been made although it might not look like that in 2018 there were 15 indictments of terrorist-related terrorism crimes I mean that's so much lower than we've seen for such a long time so who knows we're out of time we're more than out of time but let me just add my answer to the tools that we should be relying on this one of the things is people who understand this deeply who have thought about it who are colleagues this is an incredible resource for the country to have and so I just want to add it into the mix and thank you and join me in thanking our panelists