One of the central findings of the 9/11 Commission was that the intelligence and law enforcement communities had gathered enough signals to potentially detect and disrupt the plot but failed to “connect the dots” due to poor information-sharing, the siloing of information and other barriers to collaboration.
The failure to connect those dots came at the immediate cost of 3,000 American lives â and the death or injury of over 60,000 U.S. servicemembers in the wars that followed the attacks. The efforts to address the failures that led to 9/11 built the Department of Homeland Security, expanded Joint Terrorism Task Forces, established fusion centers where agencies share information and created new systems for federal, state and local agencies to better work together and prevent attacks.
Twenty-five years after the attacks, those systems need to be re-examined and reimagined.
Built for a different, slower, pre-social-media era, not only has our threat environment become more complex, but it has also become more dynamic. For organizations, this means the ability to act across borders and virtually. For individuals, it means the collapse of the timeline between radicalization and violence.
Today, a troubled individual can consume extremist content online in the morning, causing them to immediately embrace a violent ideology, post online an intention to harm others and launch an attack that same day.
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What once might have taken months, is now occurring in weeks or days.
The challenge is no longer to simply connect dots. It is identifying which dots matter in a sea of dots, getting them swiftly to the right people and acting before a threat becomes an attack.
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Few communities have experienced this shift more directly than the American Jewish community.
As the head of the Secure Community Network (SCN), the official safety and security organization for the Jewish community in North America, I have watched threats evolve from slow-moving, carefully planned conspiracies into a constant stream of online threats, suspicious activity reports and individuals moving rapidly from rhetoric to action.
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These modern-day terrorists move fast. We â community members and law enforcement â need to move faster.
Last year alone, SCN proactively identified over 850 threats to life â each of which we analyzed and then referred to the FBIs National Threat Operati
