Extremism Building to the “Doorstep of Another 9/11,” DHS Officials Says

Speaking before the U.S. House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence and Counterterrorism last week, Elizabeth Neumann, assistant secretary for Threat Prevention and Security Policy in the Office of Strategy, Policy, and Plans at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), said “every counterterrorism professional I speak to in the federal government and overseas feels like we are at the doorstep of another 9/11.” She was speaking in particular about threats to the U.S. posed by domestic extremist groups and individuals, such as those who espouse anti-Semitic and white supremacist ideologies. To her comments Neumann added, “maybe not something that catastrophic in terms of the visual or the numbers, but that we can see it building and we don’t quite know how to stop it.” Speaking about the challenges of stopping the next big attack, she noted their ability of threats to quickly metastasize in online environments and the constraints of the federal government in finding and responding to them. Brian Harrell, assistant director for Infrastructure Security at DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), was also at the hearing, telling lawmakers that “based off of current events and the frequency of events, I am convinced that this country is becoming more and more violent every single day.” Harrell stressed that, through CISA, “DHS continues our longstanding efforts with communities to share threat information, harden public gathering locations, train law enforcement and first responders and conduct a wide range of training and exercises.” One of the ways he explained that CISA conducts outreach to communities is through information sharing and analysis centers (ISACs). Read the article at Homeland Security Today.