Terrorism
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Abstract: Two months after the breakup of the Soviet Union, I was in the Russian closed nuclear cities of Sarov and Snezhinsk, home of the Russian equivalent to the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories. With our Russian counterparts, John Nuckolls, director of LLNL, and I developed a plan for scientific cooperation that would become a 20-plus year program, which began with fundamental science and then expanded to weapon safety and security, nuclear materials security, nonproliferation, and countering nuclear terrorism. Fundamental science collaboration resulted in professional respect, which, in turn, allowed us to develop the trust necessary to address the serious technical challenges resulting from the dissolution of the Soviet Union. I will describe some of the similarities and differences in how Russian and American laboratories tackled problems ranging from fundamental science to nuclear weapons stockpile stewardship. 

About the Speaker: Siegfried S. Hecker is a professor (research) in the Department of Management Science and Engineering and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). He was co-director of CISAC from 2007-2012. From 1986 to 1997, Dr. Hecker served as the fifth Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Dr. Hecker is an internationally recognized expert in plutonium science, global threat reduction, and nuclear security.

Dr. Hecker’s current research interests include plutonium science, nuclear weapons policy, nuclear security, and the safe and secure expansion of nuclear energy. Over the past 20 years, he has fostered cooperation with the Russian nuclear laboratories to secure and safeguard the vast stockpile of ex-Soviet fissile materials.

Dr. Hecker’s research projects at CISAC focus on reducing the risks of nuclear terrorism worldwide and the challenges of nuclear India, North Korea, Pakistan, and the nuclear aspirations of Iran. Dr. Hecker is also compiling and editing a book with two of his Russian colleagues on the history of Russian-U.S. laboratory-to-laboratory cooperation since 1992.

Dr. Hecker joined Los Alamos National Laboratory as graduate research assistant and postdoctoral fellow before returning as technical staff member following a tenure at General Motors Research. He led the laboratory's Materials Science and Technology Division and Center for Materials Science before serving as laboratory director from 1986 through 1997, and senior fellow until July 2005.

Among his professional distinctions, Dr. Hecker is a member of the National Academy of Engineering; foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences; fellow of the TMS, or Minerals, Metallurgy and Materials Society; fellow of the American Society for Metals; fellow of the American Physical Society, honorary member of the American Ceramics Society; and fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

His achievements have been recognized with the Presidential Enrico Fermi Award, the American Physical Society’s Leo Szilard Prize, the American Nuclear Society's Seaborg Medal, the Department of Energy's E.O. Lawrence Award, the Los Alamos National Laboratory Medal, among other awards including the Alumni Association Gold Medal and the Undergraduate Distinguished Alumni Award from Case Western Reserve University, where he earned his bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in metallurgy.

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Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Emeritus
Research Professor, Management Science and Engineering, Emeritus
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Siegfried S. Hecker is a professor emeritus (research) in the Department of Management Science and Engineering and a senior fellow emeritus at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). He was co-director of CISAC from 2007-2012. From 1986 to 1997, Dr. Hecker served as the fifth Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Dr. Hecker is an internationally recognized expert in plutonium science, global threat reduction, and nuclear security.

Dr. Hecker’s current research interests include nuclear nonproliferation and arms control, nuclear weapons policy, nuclear security, the safe and secure expansion of nuclear energy, and plutonium science. At the end of the Cold War, he has fostered cooperation with the Russian nuclear laboratories to secure and safeguard the vast stockpile of ex-Soviet fissile materials. In June 2016, the Los Alamos Historical Society published two volumes edited by Dr. Hecker. The works, titled Doomed to Cooperate, document the history of Russian-U.S. laboratory-to-laboratory cooperation since 1992.

Dr. Hecker’s research projects at CISAC focus on cooperation with young and senior nuclear professionals in Russia and China to reduce the risks of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism worldwide, to avoid a return to a nuclear arms race, and to promote the safe and secure global expansion of nuclear power. He also continues to assess the technical and political challenges of nuclear North Korea and the nuclear aspirations of Iran.

Dr. Hecker joined Los Alamos National Laboratory as graduate research assistant and postdoctoral fellow before returning as technical staff member following a tenure at General Motors Research. He led the laboratory's Materials Science and Technology Division and Center for Materials Science before serving as laboratory director from 1986 through 1997, and senior fellow until July 2005.

Among his professional distinctions, Dr. Hecker is a member of the National Academy of Engineering; foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences; fellow of the TMS, or Minerals, Metallurgy and Materials Society; fellow of the American Society for Metals; fellow of the American Physical Society, honorary member of the American Ceramics Society; and fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

His achievements have been recognized with the Presidential Enrico Fermi Award, the 2020 Building Bridges Award from the Pacific Century Institute, the 2018 National Engineering Award from the American Association of Engineering Societies, the 2017 American Nuclear Society Eisenhower Medal, the American Physical Society’s Leo Szilard Prize, the American Nuclear Society's Seaborg Medal, the Department of Energy's E.O. Lawrence Award, the Los Alamos National Laboratory Medal, among other awards including the Alumni Association Gold Medal and the Undergraduate Distinguished Alumni Award from Case Western Reserve University, where he earned his bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in metallurgy.

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Clifton Parker
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U.S. national security faces rising challenges from insider threats and organizational rigidity, a Stanford professor says.

Amy Zegart, co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, wrote in a new study that in the past five years, seemingly trustworthy U.S. military and intelligence insiders have been responsible for a number of national security incidents, including the WikiLeaks publications and the 2009 attack at Fort Hood in Texas that killed 13 and injured more than 30.

She defines "insider threats" as people who use their authorized access to do harm to the security of the United States. They could range from mentally ill people to "coldly calculating officials" who betray critical national security secrets.

In her research, which relies upon declassified investigations by the U.S. military, FBI and Congress, Zegart analyzes the Fort Hood attack and one facet of the insider threat universe – Islamist terrorists.

In this case, a self-radicalized Army psychiatrist named Nidal Hasan walked into a Fort Hood facility in 2009 and fired 200 rounds, killing 13 people and wounding dozens of others. The shooting spree remains the worst terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11 and the worst mass murder at a military site in American history, she added.

Insights and lessons learned

Zegart's study of insider and surprise attacks as well as academic research into the theory of organizations led her to some key insights about why the Army failed to prevent Hasan's attack when clues were clear:

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• Routines can create hidden hazards. People in bureaucracies tend to continue doing things the same old way, even when they should not, Zegart said, and not just in America. In the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, for example, U.S. spy planes were able to spot Soviet missile installations in Cuba because the Soviets had built them exactly like they always had in the Soviet Union – without camouflage.

In the Fort Hood case, she said, bureaucratic procedures kept red flags about Hasan in different places, making them harder to detect.

• Career incentives and organizational cultures often backfire. As Zegart wrote, several researchers found that "misaligned incentives and cultures" played major roles in undermining safety before the Challenger space shuttle disaster.

Zegart's earlier research on 9/11 found the same dynamic played a role in the FBI's manhunt for two 9/11 hijackers just 19 days before their attack. Because the FBI's culture prized convicting criminals after the fact rather than preventing disasters beforehand, the search for two would-be terrorists received the lowest priority and was handled by one of the least experienced agents in the New York office.

• Organizations matter more than most people think. Robust structures, processes and cultures that were effective in earlier periods for other tasks proved maladaptive after 9/11.

In the case of the Fort Hood attack, the evidence suggests that government investigations, which focused on individual errors and political correctness (disciplining or investigating a Muslim American in the military) identified only some of the root causes, missing key organizational failures.

Hasan slipped through the cracks not only because people made mistakes or were prone to political correctness, but also because defense organizations "worked in their usual ways," according to Zegart.

Adapting to a new threat

In terms of organizational weaknesses, Hasan's Fort Hood attack signaled a new challenge for the U.S. military: rethinking what "force protection" truly means, Zegart said. Before 9/11, force protection reflected a physical protection or hardening of potential targets from an outside attack. Now, force protection has evolved to mean that the threats could come from within the Defense Department and from Americans, she added.

"For half a century, the department's structure, systems, policies and culture had been oriented to think about protecting forces from the outside, not the inside," Zegart wrote.

In the case of Hasan, the Defense Department failed in three different ways to identify him as a threat: through the disciplinary system, the performance evaluation system and the counter-terrorism investigatory system run jointly with the FBI through Joint Terrorism Task Forces.

"Organizational factors played a significant role in explaining why the Pentagon could not stop Nidal Hasan in time. Despite 9/11 and a rising number of homegrown Jihadi terrorist attacks, the Defense Department struggled to adapt to insider terrorist threats," Zegart wrote.

Difficult to change

Another problem was that the Pentagon faced substantial manpower shortages in the medical corps – especially among psychiatrists. So the Defense Department responded to incentives and promoted Hasan, despite his increasingly poor performance and erratic behavior.

In addition, Zegart found the Defense Department official who investigated Hasan prior to the attack saw nothing amiss because he was the wrong person for the job – he was trained to ferret out waste, fraud and abuse, not counterterrorism, which is why he did not know how to look for signs of radicalization or counterintelligence risk.

"In sum, the Pentagon's force protection, discipline, promotion and counter-terrorism investigatory systems all missed this insider threat because they were designed for other purposes in earlier times, and deep-seated organizational incentives and cultures made it difficult for officials to change what they normally did," she wrote.

Zegart acknowledges the difficulties of learning lessons from tragedies like 9/11, the NASA space shuttle accidents and the 2009 Fort Hood shooting.

"People and organizations often remember what they should forget and forget what they should remember," she said, adding that policymakers tend to attribute failure to people and policies. While seemingly hidden at times, the organizational roots of disaster are much more important than many think, she added.

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Ben Mittelberger is a senior in computer science concentrating in information systems design and implementation. He is a current student in the CISAC Honors Program. His thesis is titled: "In Data We Trust?: The Big Data Capabilities of the National Counterterrorism Center." It focuses on the increasing size and complexity of intelligence datasets and whether or not the center is structured properly to leverage them. He is advised by Dr. Martha Crenshaw

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It’s a technique that’s been used to calculate the odds of everything from the likelihood of a nuclear meltdown to the chances of getting sick from eating bad seafood.

Today, a CISAC scholar told the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee that he hoped probabilistic risk analysis could help move the ball forward in the debate over encryption that’s pitted law enforcement and national security agencies against some of Silicon Valley’s most influential technology companies.

“Neither side can prove its case, and we see a clash of theological absolutes,” said Herb Lin, senior research scholar for cybersecurity at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and research fellow at the Hoover Institution, in his testimony before a full hearing of the committee.

The contentious debate over encryption has developed in the wake of the National Security Agency spying scandal, with tech titans Apple and Google recently announcing plans to implement stringent new cryptography protocols to protect customer data.

“When the Snowden documents revealed that NSA was hacking [the tech companies], there was a real sense of betrayal,” Lin said.

“You now hear tech companies talking about the U.S. government in the same way they talk about China. They feel like they have to protect themselves against the U.S. government in the same way they have to protect themselves against China. That’s a terrifying thought. In that kind of environment, there’s no trust.”

Law enforcement and national security agencies want tech companies to integrate a mechanism for the government to gain “exceptional access” to encrypted data into their new encryption technology. But, industry and privacy advocates have resisted, arguing that creating a so-called “backdoor” would make their software more vulnerable to attacks from hackers.

FBI director James B. Comey, who also testified before the committee, warned that the latest generation of encryption technology was putting American lives at risk. He said that the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) was actively recruiting homegrown terrorists via Twitter then using end-to-end encrypted mobile messaging apps to secretly send orders for them to carry out attacks within the United States.

 

going dark comey yates lin FBI Director James B. Comey (right) testifies before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee about the national security risks of end-to-end encryption, with Deputy Attorney General Sally Quillian Yates (left) at his side, as CISAC senior research scholar Herb Lin looks on from the gallery.

 

 

“Our job is to look in a haystack the size of this country for needles that are increasingly invisible to us because of end-to-end encryption,” Comey said.

Deputy Attorney General Sally Quillian Yates, who testified at Comey’s side, said law enforcement could not get access to that kind of encrypted communications, even with a valid court order.

“Critical information becomes in effect ‘warrant proof’,” she said.

“Because of this, we are creating safe zones where dangerous terrorists and criminals can operate and avoid detection.”

It is a polarizing debate.

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“You listen to what the privacy advocates say and what the government says and there’s no common ground,” said Lin.

“I’d like to find a way to move the ball forward rather than seeing both sides being stuck in the trenches shouting at each other.”

Lin’s proposal, which he presented to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, recommended that both sides focus on estimating how long it would take a hacker to break into an encrypted device equipped for “exceptional access.”

“If it takes a thousand years for a bad guy to figure out how to hack…that’s probably secure enough,” Lin testified.

“If it takes him 30 seconds, using that mechanism is a dumb idea. So somewhere between 30 seconds and a thousand years, the mechanism changes from being unworkable to being secure enough.”

Not all computer security experts believe such a calculation would be possible.

“It’s challenging to come up with a defensible methodology for estimating the risk that a backdoor system will be compromised,” said Jonathan Mayer, a Stanford PhD candidate in Computer Science and former CISAC cybersecurity fellow who garnered national headlines for his research demonstrating that the NSA could use phone metadata to reconstruct detailed personal information.

“Not only are the risks of compromise unknown – they’re unknowable.”

However, Lin said the mathematical methodology known as probabilistic risk analysis, which has widely been used to predict the likelihood of catastrophic failure in complex systems from nuclear power plants to the space shuttle, might be able to shed some useful light on the risks.

And, he said, the only way to find out if it could successfully be used to calculate the risks of encryption software getting hacked would be to conduct more research.

Veterans of the so-called “Crypto Wars” of the ‘70s and ‘90s (when the U.S. government tried to limit public access to encryption technology), like Stanford professor emeritus of electrical engineering and CISAC affiliated faculty member Martin Hellman, said proposals like Lin’s could help advance the public debate and bring both sides closer together.

“Getting the two opposing sides to talk — and listen — is really important,” Hellman said.

“That's what happened 20 years ago when Congress asked the National Academies to look at an almost identical problem. It got those different groups talking and working out compromises.”

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The International Studies Association is proud to announce that Martha Crenshaw, Senior Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Professor of Political Science (by courtesy) at Stanford University has been named the 2016 recipient of the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Distinguished Scholar Award.

Professor Crenshaw is renowned for her work on political terrorism, as one of the first scholars to have approached terrorism as a serious subject of academic inquiry.  Her steady stream of high quality publications – including two books, five edited volumes, and numerous articles – have garnered global respect and attention.  Her work has been funded by such prestigious organizations as the Ford Foundation, Pew, Guggenheim, the National Science Foundation, and the Minerva Initiative.  Dr. Crenshaw has testified before Congress, weighed in on important national policy debates and served on boards and committees in multiple fields.  She was a member of the Committee on Evaluating the Effectiveness of the Global Nuclear Detection Architecture of the National Academies of Science and serves on the editorial boards of International Security, Political Psychology, Security Studies, Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict, and Terrorism and Political Violence.  She previously served as the President and Councilor of the International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP) and a member of the executive board of Women in International Security.

Dr. Crenshaw taught for many years at Wesleyan, where she was awarded for her teaching excellence.  Many junior scholars have benefited enormously from her generous mentoring and advice, while her career has served as a model to many more scholars in the field.  Through her research, policy work, service, teaching, and mentoring, Professor Crenshaw has indelibly shaped the International Security field.  We hope that you will join us in celebrating her accomplishments at the ISSS panel and reception that will be held in her honor at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association in March 2016, in Atlanta.

In related news, Crenshaw was also elected on July 16, 2015 to the prestigious British Academy – the U.K.’s national academy for the humanities and Social Sciences – as one of 20 new Corresponding Fellows from overseas universities.

Note: This story is used by permission from the International Studies Association

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Joshua Alvarez
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CISAC's Honors Program in International Studies recently awarded three prizes to some of its students, instead of the traditional two. “At the end of the year we award prizes to three of the thesis writers. It’s always a hard decision to make because they are all really good,” said FSI Senior Fellow and Honors Co-director Martha Crenshaw.

Taylor Grossman, Patrick Cirenza, and Teo Lamiot were awarded the Firestone Medal for Excellence in Undergraduate Research, the William J. Perry Prize, and the John Holland Slusser World Peace Prize, respectively. They presented their work in front of faculty, advisors, and friends at a packed seminar in early June.

The Perry Prize, named after former Defense Secretary and current FSI Senior Fellow William Perry, is awarded to a student for excellence in policy-relevant research in international security studies. Cirenza’s thesis, “An Evaluation of the Analogy between Nuclear and Cyber Deterrence,” examined whether cyber weapons can be accurately understood by comparing them to nuclear weapons.

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Patrick Cirenza

“My thesis topic definitely evolved over time,” Cirenza said. “I really did not know that much about cyber weapons. I initially wanted to look at non-state actors in cyber space and I asked Professor Scott Sagan about that and he asked what I knew about cyber and the reality was I really did not know anything. But I still really wanted to study it and at the time I was in Condoleezza Rice’s seminar and she suggested examining the analogy between nuclear and cyber weapons, which was being used a lot at the time. I went through several different topics and ultimately landed on deterrence.”

Cirenza was advised by FSI Senior Fellow Coit Blacker, who co-directs the honors program with Crenshaw, and by consulting professor Phil Taubman. Next fall he will attend Cambridge for a one year M.Phil program in international relations. After that he hopes to join the Marine Corps infantry.

“I never wanted a desk job in my twenties and I think it’s the best way to serve my country at this time,” he said.

The newly created Slusser Prize goes to the thesis that best contributes to the development of “permanent world peace.” Lamiot’s thesis, “When Blue Helmets Do Battle: Civilian Protection in the Democratic Republic of the Congo” examined whether the use of force against rebel groups in the DRC by UN peacekeepers had any effect on atrocities committed against civilians. He was advised by FSI Senior Fellow Stephen Stedman, who formerly served as Assistant Secretary-General and Special Advisor to the Secretary-General of the United Nations.

Lamiot started formulating his thesis topic when he was working in the U.S. embassy in the DRC. “I worked in the unit that is tasked with monitoring the conflict in the eastern part of the country. Part of my work was investigating a massacre that had taken place in that region about a month before I arrived in country. The massacre was of interest to the U.S. government because the Congolese and U.N. peacekeeping forces stationed nearby did not respond to the massacre despite knowing that it was going on,” he recounted.

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Teo Lamiot

“This sparked my interest and, at first, I wanted to answer the question why do peacekeepers use force in some cases but not in others, but I ultimately decided on answering what happens when they do use force. I’m hoping that my argument that in some cases using force has positive effects and decreases rebel violence against civilians informs these decision-makers on the ground when they are choosing what to do.”

After graduation Lamiot will be on a Center for Democracy, Development, and Rule of Law fellowship in Uganda doing development work. “I’ll likely be working on democratic and political development. I’m trying to learn something about how outside actors can try to bring about these development outcomes in foreign countries.”

The Firestone Medal is a Stanford-wide prize awarded to the top ten percent of all honors theses in social science, science, and engineering. Grossman, who will also graduate with a B.A. Political Science, wrote hers on homeland security and the evolution of terrorism advisory systems. She was advised by CISAC Co-Director Amy Zegart.

“I really wanted to look at effectiveness of communication and intelligence sharing, but in a way that I could actually see government information. That led me to public warning systems for terrorism where there is a lot of public information available. Not a lot has been written on how effective they are, how they operate, or how they have evolved,” Grossman said.

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Taylor Grossman

After graduation she plans on joining the Hoover Institution as a research assistant.

“I feel like I majored in CISAC. Ever since I took the class ‘The Face of Battle’ with Professor Scott Sagan and Colonel Joe Felter, I’ve been hooked on international security and the issues CISAC focuses on. I think the honors program has been the defining part of my undergraduate career. It was really rewarding and challenging and I’m glad I did it.”

Grossman and Cirenza were also elected to the Phi Beta Kappa Society in May 2015, as was Geo Saba, a political science major. Phi Beta Kappa is a nationwide society honoring students for the excellence and breadth of their undergraduate scholarly accomplishments.

Additionally, the Stanford Alumni Association (SAA) selected Cirenza, Grossman, and Akshai Baskaran, who majored in chemical engineering, to receive an Award of Excellence. 

Congratulations to all graduates of the Class of 2015: Akshai Baskaran, Patrick Cirenza, Kelsey Dayton, Taylor Grossman, Sean Hiroshima, Annie Kapnick, Sarah Kunis, Teo Lamiot, Austin Lewis, Sam Rebo, Geo Saba, Eliza Thompson, and Adrienne von Schulthess.

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U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) told a Stanford audience Thursday that mass surveillance programs are designed to find possible terrorists, not snoop on American citizens.

She pointed to the rise of groups like ISIS – now in 12 countries, she said – and the gruesome spectacles of their brand of terrorism as proof that the world is more dangerous than ever.

"I don't think during my lifetime I've ever seen the degree of evil that is out there in the world today," said Feinstein, noting mass murders and beheadings of innocent civilians, including children. "These [surveillance] programs aim to protect this country, pure and simple. They're not aimed to go after Americans."

Feinstein was the final speaker in the yearlong series titled "The Security Conundrum." She spoke in a colloquy format with Stanford's Philip Taubman, consulting professor at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and former Washington bureau chief of the New York Times. 

Sen. Dianne Feinstein was the final speaker in the yearlong series titled 'The Security Conundrum.' 

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The discussion comes during a national debate on how to strike the right balance between security and liberty when technology now makes it possible for the government to collect phone and email data on citizens. With the USA Freedom Act expiring on June 1, Congress is considering legislation to reform the National Security Agency's mass surveillance program.

"We recognize that some reform is in order," said Feinstein, who plans to fly back to Washington for a rare Sunday Senate session on the expiring law.

"The big reform is that the data would be held by the phone companies and not the NSA," she said. If red flags resulted in queries, then warrants would have to be approved.

She took issue with descriptions of those programs as "mass surveillance." In 2013, warrants were sought in just 12 cases out of 288 queries about possible suspects. She said it is a selective process to find a suspect who raises enough concerns to trigger a query.

Feinstein's talk, titled "Congressional Oversight and the Intelligence Community," was held at CEMEX Auditorium.

Feinstein served as chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence from 2009 to 2014 and is now the ranking minority member. She played a leading role in the Senate investigation of the Central Intelligence Agency detention and interrogation program following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

'Miscarriages of justice'

Taubman asked Feinstein if she was worried that the surveillance programs could track law-abiding citizens, like more primitive efforts in the 1960s and '70s that targeted political and civil rights groups. Feinstein acknowledged that abuses happened in the past, but that congressional oversight of the programs – as is the case today – is essential to a fair process.

In particular, Feinstein decried the government's interrogation process of terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay that resulted in claims of torture. Her committee reviewed considerable intelligence data on that issue. "We found there were terrible miscarriages of justice," she said.

She described intelligence agencies as akin to "presidents" in the power they wield. "How do you make these agencies follow the law?" she asked. The only way is to "get in deep enough and close enough" to make it impossible for them to tell an "untruth" in a congressional hearing, she said.

Taubman suggested that it's extremely hard for a few dozen congressional staffers and members to oversee large agencies that employ thousands of people. "You're outgunned," he said.

Feinstein replied that "we have to look beyond the hearing." She said bipartisanship and a focus on producing effective legislation that addresses real problems is critical. "That's the nature of what we do."

She added that no other country in the world has an intelligence committee with as strong an oversight function as does the United States. China and Russia, for example, have growing intelligence agencies but no one watching them.

Feinstein agreed with Taubman that too much secrecy is detrimental to a democratic society. She said she wished she would have held more open, public meetings while in charge of the intelligence committee.

Feinstein expects that renewing the legislation will depend on perhaps three votes in the Senate. "It's possible. If not, the law ends at midnight and that creates a chink in our armor. There's no question in my mind," she said.

Feinstein said there is a "backup" bill that is similar to the USA Freedom Act, but she would prefer to reform the original legislation.

Taubman asked her if the surveillance efforts were actually preventing terrorist acts.

Feinstein said that people are arrested every week under the program, and that relevant information also goes to other countries to help them.

But more than ever, she noted, it's the private sector – not the government – that is extremely enterprising in collecting vast amounts of data from people, such as how they use their cellphones or surf the web.

CIA, China an issue

A California Democrat and Stanford graduate, Feinstein has served in the U.S. Senate since 1993.

When asked why she continues to work as a public servant, she said that 9/11 was a pivotal point in her life. That tragic event and flawed intelligence regarding the justification for the war in Iraq convinced her that a senior position on the intelligence committee would give her a way to help protect her country and fellow citizens.

Taubman expressed amazement that the CIA was actually spying on Feinstein's committee during its review of the hostage intelligence data.

"It was a real dust-up, there's no question about. I think it was a real violation of the separation of powers," she said.

On other issues, such as the rise of China, Feinstein said that country is now practicing "soft power" and flexing its muscles in the South China Sea. Plus, China is "eating our lunch" in regard to cybersecurity.

"I am very worried," she said. "I do not see China as a necessary enemy, but it seems to be going the opposite direction now."

In addition to CISAC, sponsors of "The Security Conundrum" series included the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the Hoover InstitutionStanford Continuing StudiesStanford in Government and Stanford Law School.

The series "was designed to be an open inquiry in the ongoing debate on how to balance security and liberty," said Amy Zegart, co-director of CISAC and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

This year the series has also included Gen. Michael Hayden, the former director of the National Security Agency and the CIA; journalist Barton Gellman; and former U.S. Sen. Mark Udall.

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What is it about terrorism that makes it so difficult to study and counteract through U.S. government policy? That’s the central question CISAC Senior Fellow Martha Crenshaw hopes to answer in an upcoming book she is co-authoring with Gary LaFree, Director of the National Center for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), where Crenshaw serves as lead investigator. at the University of Maryland. 

The idea for the book stems from Crenshaw’s long career in grappling with terrorism and observing how governments struggle to combat it. She has been writing and thinking about terrorism since the 1970s and is currently conducting a multi-year project mapping the evolution of violent extremist groups. However, the difficulties inherent in the topic have not much changed for academics and policymakers.

The problems start with defining terrorism, something that has bedeviled both researchers and policymakers for decades, Crenshaw told a Stanford audience in CISAC. 

“We are still arguing about what terrorism means. But even if you agree on a definition, then applying it to the real world remains difficult,” she said.

Beyond semantics, the study of terrorism faces a series of hurdles inherent to the topic. An overarching social theory of the causes of terrorism remains elusive, and there is no agreement on whether terrorism actually works. 

Additionally, academics have used many different levels of analyses–individual, organizational, cultural, economic, and others–but have yet to agree on which analyses bear more fruit.

Despite what you might gather from what’s said in the media, terrorism events are actually very rare. Terrorist attacks that kill large amounts of people are even more rare. “9/11 was a black swan, a highly consequential event but only a one-of-a-kind. We show why it’s the case that terrorism is very rare and therefore makes it very hard to predict any kind of trends,” Crenshaw said.

Most of the information available is about attacks that actually happened. But there are many more plots, about ten times more, than actual attacks. Crenshaw said she and her research assistants have used news media and government documents to identify failed and foiled plots against the United States, European Union, and NATO countries plus Australia and New Zealand. The plots have been coded in a dataset that she will analyze.  

There are additional obstacles in the way of researchers and policymakers. 

Attributing responsibility for attacks is difficult, which hampers research and government responses. “How do you know who to respond against? The concept of terrorism is mixed in with insurgency. It’s hard to think of a policy that targets one but not the other,” Crenshaw said. Terrorist organizations are very small and the boundaries between groups are extremely porous. Yet, there is not a preponderance of lone wolves.

Sometimes, the U.S. government obstructs research. Crenshaw lamented the over-classification of government documents, and drew particular attention to the designation “For Official Use Only”, which is not a classification but a designation that seems to depend on the agency using it. 

“If you are analyzing illegal forms of violence there are three sources of information: governments, victims, and terrorists. Victims are difficult to find. Self-reporting is even harder and usually unfeasible. And governments are very secretive. We would like to see more transparency and openness on their part,” she said.

“I think what is being done here is really important when it comes to the question of why it’s so hard to find policy solutions for terrorism,” said Betsy Cooper, a Law and International Security Postdoctoral Fellow at CISAC, who offered commentary on the book draft to the seminar. “A lot of what is in the chapter about the state of counter-terrorism research is very important.” 

“I learned a lot especially about the automation in the global terrorism database and it poses some interesting questions. Is something terrorism because we say it is or can we use objective criteria regardless of whether you see it as something else?” 

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France is grappling with rising terrorism and the climate change problem, French Ambassador Gérard Araud said during a talk sponsored by The Europe Center.

"We had been expecting a terrorist attack for some time," said Araud, referencing the January massacre in Paris in which two shooters who identified themselves as Islamic terrorists killed 12 people at the Charlie Hebdo newspaper offices and wounded several others. "The attack in Paris was like our 9/11."

He said that France is undertaking both educational and law enforcement efforts aimed at taming the spread of radicalized Islamic youth in the country – but there is no easy solution.

For example, it is almost impossible to monitor all the potential suspects, shut down offensive websites only to see them pop up shortly thereafter, and even track youth coming and going from Islamic campaigns in places like Syria and Iraq.

"Everything," Araud said, "depends on the balance between civil liberties and law enforcement. We're trying to adjust to this new threat."

More than a hundred people turned out for Araud's talk, which was held in the Koret-Taube Conference Center. The event, held May 1, was billed as the "State of the France-U.S. Relationship and Priorities for 2015."

Araud was appointed Ambassador of France to the United States in 2014. He has held positions within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Development. During his career, Araud became an expert on the Middle East and security issues, and was the French negotiator on the Iranian nuclear issue from 2003 to 2006.

He spoke about the problem of increasing anti-Semitism in France.

"It's totally unacceptable," he said. On the educational front, French schools routinely teach students about the horrors of the Holocaust and some even make field trips to places like Auschwitz, one of the Nazi concentration camps where Jewish people were exterminated during World War II.

One upcoming topic of global interest, Araud said, is the United Nations climate change conference scheduled to start Nov. 30 in Paris.

He described it as perhaps a "last chance" attempt at an effective global agreement on the issue, and sounded upbeat about the possibility of success. "Things are much more positive than in 2009" when similar talks in Copenhagen failed to spark worldwide unity.

The reasons, he said, are that more countries are acknowledging the impact of carbon emissions and that China has expressed a desire to cooperate. But much depends on the talks in Paris, both their tone and substance.

"Top down approval certainly won't work," Araud said, noting that the conference needs to produce a consistent and credible message of action on climate change that appeals to many countries.

He noted Stanford's new energy system aims to cut campus greenhouse gas emissions by 68 percent and fossil fuel by 65 percent. "It's quite positive," he said.

Michael McFaul, director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, introduced Araud and described the bilateral relationship between the United States and France as "central to everything that we do."

McFaul pointed out that Araud played a key role in the writing of the economic sanctions that eventually brought Iran to the nuclear negotiations table.

When he started his speech, Araud said it was his first visit to Stanford. "Thank you for the weather," he smiled.

 

Clifton B. Parker is a writer for the Stanford News Service.

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This is a letter response to an article by Eric Schlosser on a break-in at the Y-12 nuclear facility. The letter argues that security vulnerability should not be translated into an exaggerated threat of nuclear terrorism, fear of which has had serious negative effects on American democracy and poses a more immediate threat than that of a nuclear terrorist attack.

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Leonard Weiss
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