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?” 

In this talk sponsored by the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, three CISAC scholars discuss the Islamic State, Iran and the Taliban and the threats they impose to American security. The talk is moderated by Brad Kapnick, a Partner at Katten & Temple, LLP, and SIEPR Advisory Board member. Joining him are Martha Crenshaw, a senior fellow at CISAC and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and professor, by courtesy, of political science; CISAC Senior Fellow Scott Sagan, the Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science; former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry, the William J. Perry Fellow at CISAC and a consulting professor at the Freeman Spogli Institute.

This is an abbreviated version of the talk below. The full talk can be found here.

Former U.S. Sen. Mark Udall gained notoriety for his vocal opposition to National Security Agency surveillance programs in the wake of the Edward Snowden disclosures of June 2013.

Before losing his seat in the mid-term elections last year, the senior senator from Colorado had become one of the staunchest critics of the U.S. spy agency for conducting massive, warrantless data grabs on millions of Americans without their knowledge.

Even before the Snowden leaks, Udall had warned on the Senate floor in 2011 that the Patriot Act was being interpreted in a way to allow domestic surveillance activities that many members of Congress and the American public do not understand.

"Americans would be alarmed if they knew how this law is being carried out," he told fellow senators before he introduced amendments to the Patriot Act that would have secured tougher privacy mechanisms. The act was renewed without the amendments.

Udall – who served on the Senate's Intelligence and Armed Services committees – will be in conversation with Center for International Security and Cooperation Co-Director Amy Zegart Thursday, April 2, at 7:30 p.m. in CEMEX Auditorium as part of Stanford's Security Conundrum lecture series. The event is open to the public but an RSVP is required by 5 p.m. April 1.

The special series has brought together nationally prominent experts this academic year to explore the critical issues raised by the NSA's activities, including their impact on security, privacy and civil liberties. The series ends April 10 with a public conversation with Judge Reggie Barnett Walton, former presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 empowered the FISA court to oversee government requests for surveillance of foreign intelligence agencies. During its existence, the court has granted more than 30,000 warrants; it has denied only 11.

Walton, in conversation with Stanford Law School Professor Jenny Martinez, will explain the role that the secretive institution attempts to play in maintaining the balance between civil liberties and national security.

"We're delighted to end the Security Conundrum series with a view from Congress and the courts," said Zegart, who is also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. "Holding serious campus-wide conversations about issues of national importance is an essential part of the Stanford experience."

Zegart said CISAC and Hoover would conduct a similar series on international cybersecurity challenges in the coming academic year.

Udall, the third speaker in the series, also advocated for the declassification of the Senate Intelligence Committee's study on the CIA's enhanced interrogation program. The post-9/11 program allowed the government to ship suspected terrorists to secret overseas prisons and subject them to waterboarding and other torture techniques.

Gen. Michael Hayden, the former director of the NSA and CIA who has defended the government surveillance programs, kicked off the Security Conundrum series in October. In that talk, he said the metadata collection "is something we would never have done on Sept. 9 or Sept. 10. But it seemed reasonable after Sept. 11. No one is doing this out of prurient interests. No – it as a logical response to the needs of the moment."

The second speaker in the series, journalist Barton Gellman, gave a detailed account of his relationship with former NSA contractor Snowden and how he worked with him to reveal the details of the NSA's global and domestic surveillance programs.

One of the first Snowden revelations, Gellman said, was the top-secret PRISM surveillance program, in which the NSA tapped into the servers of nine large U.S. Internet companies, including Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook. Snowden said he believed the extent of mass data collection on American citizens was far greater than what the public knew.

The PRISM program allows the U.S. intelligence community to gain access from the tech companies to a wide range of digital information, including audio, video chats, photographs, emails and stored data, that enables analysts to track foreign targets. The program does not require individual warrants, but instead operates under the broad authorization of the FISA court.

"I asked him very bluntly, 'Why are you doing this?'" Gellman said of Snowden.

"He gave me very persuasive and consistent answers about his motives. Whatever you think of what he did or whether or not I should have published these stories, I would claim to you that all the evidence supports his claim that he had come across a dangerous accumulation of state power that the people needed to know about."