General Security and Resilience

During his keynote address for a meeting of Utah-based law enforcement officers yesterday, FBI Director Christopher Wray stated “the primary terrorist threat to the homeland here today, without question, is homegrown violent extremists. That’s what keeps us awake at night.” A homegrown violent extremist, or HVE, is a person based in the U.S. who has become radicalized and inspired by foreign terrorist groups, such as the Islamic State or al Qa’ida.

The use of the Russian nerve agent Novichok in the assassination attempt of double agent Sergei Skripal in the quiet city of Salisbury, England was a violation of international law banning the use of chemical weapons. Specialist Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, who works for a company that supplies gas masks to the U.S. military, calls it a turning point. "The hundred-year taboo on the use of chemical weapons has been completely broken," he said. Gordon said it only took a couple of drops of Novichok to shut down parts of Salisbury for months.

US officials have expressed confidence that Ibrahim al-Asiri, al Qa’ida’s master bombmaker, was killed by a CIA drone strike last year. Al-Asiri was known for having perfected miniaturized bombs with little to no metal content, making them difficult for screening processes to detect. He is believed to have been behind such high-profile plots as the “underwear bomb” attempt that intended to detonate a flight in 2009 and “the printer bomb” that involved planting explosive devices in printers sent from Yemen to the US.

In light of the numerous and highly destructive wildfires that have scorched large areas of the western U.S., the New York Times has published an article noting that most of these events are triggered by a human, usually unintentionally. According to Lynne Tolmachoff, the chief of public education at Cal Fire, in California almost 95 percent of fires are started by people, and about 7 percent are caused by arson. The rest are mostly fires started by lightning or other acts of Mother Nature, such as wind taking down a power line.