The Threat of Homegrown Terrrorism

Lydia Khalil, a former counterterrorism analyst for the New York Police Department, and a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations looks at homegrown terrorism, recent plots and arrests and what they may signify.

The apprehension last week of Sudbury native Tarek Mehanna is the fifth terrorism-related arrest in the United States in as many months, putting homegrown radicalism back on the radar screen. But many question whether individuals like Mehanna are the “real deal.’’ Do they really pose a significant terrorist threat or are they acting out but lack the capability to inflict any real damage? How dangerous are homegrown radicals? Will the United States, like Europe, become more susceptible to native radicals rather than terrorist plots hatched abroad from organized groups like Al Qaeda?

Terrorism specialist Marc Sageman claims that we are facing a “leaderless jihad.’’ Al Qaeda central is not the driving force of terrorism as an operational machine but rather its ideology serves as an inspiration for self-organizing local groups to carry out their own attacks.

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NYPD Secures Synagogues Against Retaliation

The New York Police Department has put together a response plan that includes deploying extra officers, including heavily armed Hercules Teams, at synagogues, Jewish community centers and Israel diplomatic offices, out of concern that Muslim extremists might retaliate if Israel should attack Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Similar precautions were taken last year after Hizballah commander Imad Mughniyeh was killed in a car bombing in Damascus, for which the Lebanese terrorists blamed Israel. Read more

Is Houston A Target For Terrorists?

When al-Qaida first attacked the World Trade Center in 1993 a Palestinian who was part of the conspiracy— had just months earlier been living right here in Houston.

Then in 2006, Federal agents arrested three men, Shiraz Qazi, Adnan Mirza, and Kobi Williams, in Houston. The case against the trio involved learning to use weapons here in order to join the Taliban overseas and fight U.S. soldiers.

Two of the men, Mirza and Qazi, were Pakistanis with student visas. One of them reportedly lived in a west side apartment.

The third man, Williams, worked part time at Rice University and lived near the Galleria and had been heard on a local Pakistani radio show according to the FBI.

Then in 2007, Daniel Maldonado, a Muslim convert who’d lived at a complex off the Beltway, admitted to actually training with al-Qaida in Somalia.

Records show that these men are the terrorists or would-be terrorists amongst us. The job for law enforcement has been to detect such people.

But who does that best? The FBI or the CIA? How about HPD?

Newsweek’s Christopher Dickey has a possible answer to that question.

He’s been writing about terrorists for 20 years and is author of “Securing the City” book. In it, he focuses on NYPD but there are lessons for Houston, he said.

“The police have always been a great entry level job for immigrants,” said Dickey.

He said that the NYPD has had great success utilizing officers from immigrant families, officers with native language skills and street creed that he says can sometimes give them better intelligence-gathering abilities than the FBI or CIA.

“People will trust you and will talk to you,” he said.

He said that is also a critical factor in Houston. He said that working sources in diverse communities could pick up signs of terrorism.

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e-Guardian – FBI Shares Threat Info With Local Police Agencies

The FBI has launched a system to share tips about possible terror threats with local police agencies just in time for the presidential inauguration.

The program aims to get law enforcement at all levels sharing data quickly about suspicious activity and people, particularly in and around the nation’s capital in the week leading up to the historic ceremony.

Officials say they are getting as many as 1,000 tips a day from the public.

Called e-Guardian, the program had been delayed and underwent a smaller pilot project before launching New Year’s Eve as a system available to law enforcement agencies around the country.

Federal authorities hope the new system overcomes a drawback of another version, which lets police report their suspicions to the FBI but doesn’t allow officers to search the system for similar patterns in other jurisdictions.

The program “will allow all law enforcement to share threats and suspicious activity and hopefully prevent a terrorist attack,” said FBI supervisor Gerald Rogero, in Washington.

Of the 1,000 tips, a dozen might be worth noting in the new system.

With e-Guardian, Rogero said, those specific reports can be quickly checked by police in far-flung jurisdictions in case they have noticed something similar, such as a wave of uniform thefts or stolen military equipment.

Any law enforcement officer with an Internet connection and an account on the system can access e-Guardian.

via The Associated Press: FBI shares threat-tips with local police agencies.

An NYPD detective is e-mailed a photograph of two suspicious men who appear to be casing the Brooklyn Bridge. Her department uploads the picture and inputs details about the pair into a computerized, Internet-based system called eGuardian, looking for similar incidents. Lo and behold, there’s a match. Two men fitting the description had been spotted 48 hours earlier photographing the Washington Monument and are being sought for questioning. The NYPD report is sent via eGuardian to the state’s fusion center, which reviews it and then passes it along to our New York Joint Terrorism Task Force, which will in turn share it with D.C. investigators.

It’s purely a hypothetical, but it’s exactly the kind of dot-collecting and dot-connecting that will soon be possible between law enforcement and intelligence players at every level of government across the country—thanks to FBI technology.

The eGuardian system—which is being piloted by several agencies and will start being rolled out in phases nationwide by year’s end, complete with training—will enable near real-time sharing and tracking of terror information and suspicious activities with our local, state, tribal, and federal partners. It’s actually a spin-off of a similar but classified tool called Guardian that we’ve been using inside the Bureau—and sharing with vetted partners—for the past four years.

How Guardian works. FBI field offices and Legal Attaché offices overseas input suspicious activity reports, potential terrorism threats (like a phoned-in bomb threat), and terrorist incidents (like actual bombings). This information is tracked, triaged, searched, and analyzed by agents and analysts at FBI Headquarters, and—if appropriate—submitted to one of our 106 Joint Terrorism Task Forces around the country for further action.

How eGuardian works. In a very similar way, except it will be available through our secure Law Enforcement Online Internet portal to more than 18,000 agencies, which will be able to run searches and input their own reports. Their entries will be automatically sent to a state “fusion center” (or a similar intelligence-based hub) for vetting, where trained personnel will evaluate it and then either monitor it, close it, or refer it to the appropriate FBI terror task force. Ultimately, eGuardian will add additional capabilities like geo-spatial mapping, live chats, and link analysis.

Guardian and eGuardian will work together, feeding each other. eGuardian entries with a possible terrorism nexus will be pushed to Guardian and out to our task forces, and unclassified threat and suspicious activity information from the FBI housed in Guardian will be pushed to eGuardian and out to the entire law enforcement community. It’s an effective one-two punch.

Urgent matters and investigative issues, however, will continue to be worked with state and local law enforcement through existing FBI channels.

What happens if an incident has no probable link to terrorism? The report is deleted to ensure personal data is not being needlessly stored. If the information is deemed “inconclusive,” it will remain in eGuardian for up to five years, in accordance with federal regulations.

eGuardian is yet another FBI technology that is enabling information to flow and dots to be connected in powerful new ways. By making the jobs of law enforcement easier, it will help make our communities safer.
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NY Police Eye Disrupting Cell Phones in Terrorist Threat

The New York Police Department is looking for new methods to disrupt cell phone calls and other forms of electronic communication among potential terrorists — part of what the NYPD and other law enforcement agencies say are the “lessons learned” after the deadly November terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India.

NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly told federal anti-terror officials that the NYPD must have the ability to disrupt cell phone calls in the event of another planned attack on New York City.

Fox News reports that a draft copy of Kelly’s statement to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security says the NYPD believes the Mumbai attacks could be a model for other low-tech attacks. It was not clear whether the NYPD has the means to disrupt electronic communications for a small group of terrorists without shutting down cell phone service to a large part of New York City.

Kelly said that in the India attacks, the terrorists had handlers who used cell phones and other portable communication devices to order the killing of hostages and adjust tactics during the siege of Mumbai.

The 10 attackers, who Indian authorities say came from Pakistan, fanned out to locations such as hotels and buildings, taking and executing hostages and holding off Indian security forces for several days. The attacks left more than 170 people dead and some 300 wounded.

via Source – msnbc.com.