NYPD’s Counterterrorism Operations

Yesterday afternoon, the Washington Institute hosted Richard Falkenrath, the NYPD Deputy Commissioner for Counterterrorism, as part of a lecture series the Institute has been running since late 2007 with senior US counterterrorism officials.

Here is an excerpt of his remarks:

The threat is both external and internal. The external threat, I think, is best understood by the federal government and by the Beltway experts. I think the internal threat – the homegrown threat – is far less well understood by counterterrorism experts in Washington. And there’s a reason for that, which is our entire counterterrorism intelligence collection process in the United States requires predication. It requires various conditions to be met in order for the FBI or the other agencies involved to proceed with their investigations.

Now, that predication is usually foreign intelligence of one kind or another. And when we get it, the federal government is well-positioned to proceed with counterterrorism investigations. It’s far more difficult when there is no connection to a foreign terrorist organization, and when there’s no connection to any terrorist organization – when it’s just an individual or a small number of individuals who may be watching television or downloading videos or getting on Web sites, but not actually connected to anyone who we know to be bad, but who might themselves decide to go try something.

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