Domestic terrorism is almost always more challenging because law enforcement has been so effective in breaking up structured terrorist organizations over the past few decades.
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So, we end up with a lot of lone actors who participate in amorphous communities of extremism for inspiration/radicalization, the majority of whose members never engage in violence.
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Let’s be honest, most of the folks who engage in these communities and then decide to escalate to violence are rarely upstanding, emotionally stable with a firm grip on reality. They usually have a smorgasbord of issues, big and small.
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So, when an attack occurs, intelligence analysts are often asked to make a determination if it is terrorism or not. While a complete determination may take days/weeks/months/never to happen, decision makers always want an answer sooner.
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Why does the terrorism label matter? From an immediate emergency response perspective it usually doesn’t. We need to treat the injured, secure the scene for the investigation and communicate w/the community.
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But, the terrorism/not terrorism label can have big policy implications. Is a specific population being targeted? Are there mitigation methods to deploy? Are there ways to disrupt the terrorists from future attacks? Should government change their position?
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So how to make that determination with scanty information and little time? We used a “reasonable person” standard for initial determination. Analysts would present their best for/against cases relying on their subject matter expertise.
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Usually consensus would emerge but in those cases where my team was split I would invoke supreme executive power and make a determination OR ask for more information.
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The critical part was identifying the key indicators that we thought would strengthen or weaken the determination. Analysts would then be explicitly tasked with tracking those and we would revisit them every time we briefed or wrote a product.
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All of this previous thread was a lead up to say: at this point it’d be my opinion that there’s enough to consider the
#incel movement as worthy of study as other extremists like sovereign citizens, white supremacy, anarchists, etc. so what does that mean?2 replies 1 retweet 1 likeShow this thread
The incel movement should probably be studied as a subset of a larger community.
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