While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to the war on terror, the United States needs to reconsider its strategy in dealing with these threats, a Stanford scholar says.

"For the United States, a counterterrorism strategy cannot be considered in isolation from other policies," said Martha Crenshaw, a terrorism expert and senior fellow at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation, in an interview.

"This means that our actions should be justifiable and transparent." 

In a chapter of a new book, Crenshaw advocates vigilance against terrorism, while not overreacting. It is not prudent to be complacent about the impact of terrorism on international security, though it is by no means an "existential threat" for developed countries, she wrote.

Crenshaw founded the Mapping Militant Organizations project to identify militant organizations globally and trace how they arise, their root causes and their connections.

In an interview, she said, "We are all fond of saying that there is no military solution to a political problem and that the states that are directly threatened by terrorism, such as Pakistan, Afghanistan or Iraq, should muster the resolve and resources to combat it. But we haven't figured out how to implement these rather abstract prescriptions and admonitions."

She suggested that there is a role for military force and outside powers, but it should be limited and precise in intent. 

America's actions against terrorism should not violate democratic norms, Crenshaw said. "And we should not veer erratically between complacency and alarm, but take a middle ground."

She said context is all-important. "It's frustrating, but there is no one-size-fits-all strategy. Similar countries have reacted differently to terrorism yet produced the same overall outcome."

Negotiation and compromise?

One challenge for countries like the United States is to find alternatives in confronting terrorism. For example, governments may need to decide whether to recognize or negotiate with groups they deem as terrorist entities.

"Is compromise possible?" she wrote, citing failures in Sri Lanka and Colombia but success in Northern Ireland on this front. There is no consistent answer, she said.

An approach of realism and expectations of mixed results may define the best way forward, she said.

"Perhaps the most important lesson for the international community is that the process of ending terrorism is likely to be slow and arduous, requiring gradualism, endurance and commitment despite setback," Crenshaw wrote.

She added, "States may not be able to prevent or eradicate terrorism, but they can manage their reactions to it."

She advocates "capacity building," or giving local governments the capacity to deal with terrorism by building more effective security institutions in the broadest sense.

"What happens at the local level is important to overall international security," Crenshaw said. "Terrorism threatens the stability of already weak and fragile states, thus contributing to state collapse, ungoverned spaces, social dislocation, repression and economic decline."

Drone debate

Crenshaw said that the United States increasingly prefers the use of drones rather than large-scale military options in the fighting of terrorism.

"Drones are a highly efficient means of implementing a policy of targeted killings of leaders of militant groups," she wrote.

Drone usage began under the Bush administration, she noted, and peaked in 2010 under the Obama administration. "Future U.S. counterterrorism strategy will rely on the covert use of limited force, utilizing drones and special operations forces," she wrote.

What are the implications of drone warfare? Crenshaw said that questions remain unanswered about how international law applies to drones, as well as issues of accountability and transparency.

"Despite their precision," she said, "drones kill civilians."

Political violence

It is difficult to predict when and where terrorism may strike, she said. Terrorists are innovative and they experiment, especially when faced with adjusting to new obstacles.

"For example, just when hijackings were thought to be a relic of the past, Al Qaeda combined them with suicide missions to achieve the devastating 9/11 surprise," Crenshaw wrote, referring to the Sept. 11, 2001 attack on the Pentagon and New York's World Trade Center.

She said that Muslims bear the brunt of terrorism, suffering between 82 percent and 97 percent of all deaths. In terms of trends, suicide missions are increasingly used as a lethal tactic.

From 1991 to 2001, there were 170 suicide attacks causing 2,077 deaths, while since 9/11, there have been 2,130 such attacks resulting in 26,866 deaths. Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan are the most common places where terror incidents occur.

Why have terrorists been so unsuccessful in wielding radiological, chemical or biological weapons? So far, the Japanese subway sarin attacks in 1995 remain the only instance of chemical weapons being used by a terrorist group. "Are the acquisition and use of such weapons too difficult? The answers are still elusive," Crenshaw said.

Meanwhile, "cyberterrorism" has largely been conducted by sophisticated state actors – like the Stuxnet virus that damaged the Iranian centrifuges – and not terrorists. It remains to be seen whether terrorists have such capabilities, Crenshaw wrote.

Crenshaw's chapter, "Dealing with Terrorism," will be published by the United States Institute of Peace in the forthcoming new book, Managing Conflict in a World Adrift.

She noted, "Terrorism has been a common strategy for challenging the status quo for quite a long period of time – at least since the European revolutionary and anarchist movements of the late 19th century. There is no reason to think it will disappear."

CISAC Consulting Professor Thomas Hegghammer writes in this Lawfare Foreign Policy Essay: Calculated Caliphate that the move by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) to declare itself an Islamic State with a caliphate as its leader is a "bold and unprecedented" move.

Hegghammer, director of terrorism research at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment and a leading scholar of the jihadist movement, explores the motivations, both strategic and ideological, behind the recent ISIS revelations in Iraq.

The National Security Agency's mass surveillance of telephone metadata could yield detailed information about the private lives of individuals far beyond what the federal government claims, according to new Stanford research.

Stanford computer science student and CISAC cybersecurity fellow Jonathan Mayer and a fellow CS student, Patrick Mutchler, were able to acquire detailed information about people's lives just from telephone metadata: the phone number of the caller and recipient, the particular serial number of the phones involved, the time and duration of calls and possibly the location of each person when the call occurred.

The researchers did not do any illegal snooping – they worked with the phone records of 546 volunteers, matching phone numbers against the public Yelp and Google Places directories to see who was being called.

From the phone numbers, it was possible to determine that 57 percent of the volunteers made at least one medical call. Forty percent made a call related to financial services.

The volunteers called 33,688 unique numbers; 6,107 of those numbers, or 18 percent, were isolated to a particular identity.

Privacy issues

The metadata issue has taken on urgency in the wake of last summer's revelations about surveillance of American citizens by the NSA. Privacy experts have questioned the federal government's assertions on the subject.

President Obama has said, "They are not looking at people's names, and they're not looking at content."

Jonathan Mayer talks to Hari Sreenivasan on PBS Newshour in this video: 

Computer scientists such as Mayer say metadata are extremely sensitive and revealing.

They contend their research shows that metadata from phone calls can yield a wealth of detail about family, political, professional, religious and sexual associations.

"It would be no technical challenge to scale these identifications to a larger population," said Mayer.

At the outset, Mayer said, they asked, "Is it easy to draw sensitive inferences from phone metadata? How often do people conduct sensitive matters by phone? We turned to our crowdsourced MetaPhone dataset for empirical answers."

They crowdsourced the data using an Android application and conducted an analysis of individual calls made by the volunteers to sensitive numbers, connecting the patterns of calls to emphasize the detail available in telephone metadata, Mayer said.

"A pattern of calls will, of course, reveal more than individual call records," he said. "In our analysis, we identified a number of patterns that were highly indicative of sensitive activities or traits."

For example, one participant called several local neurology groups, a specialty pharmacy, a rare-condition management service, and a pharmaceutical hotline used for multiple sclerosis.

Another contacted a home improvement store, locksmiths, a hydroponics dealer and a head shop.

'Unambiguously sensitive'

The researchers initially shared the same hypothesis as their computer science colleagues, Mayer said. They did not anticipate finding much evidence one way or the other.

"We were wrong. Phone metadata is unambiguously sensitive, even over a small sample and short time window. We were able to infer medical conditions, firearm ownership and more, using solely phone metadata," he said.

All three branches of the federal government are now considering curbs on access to telephone metadata, Mayer noted. Consumer privacy concerns are also salient as the Federal Communications Commission assesses telecom data sharing practices, he added.

U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein is alleging the CIA may have violated the U.S. Constitution by spying on the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Feinstein, D-Calif., who chairs the committee and has been a longtime supporter of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, made a dramatic speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate, accusing the CIA of possible criminal activity in its attempts to obstruct the committee’s investigation into the agency’s use of torture in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

CIA Director John Brennan has dismissed the charges as “beyond the scope of reason” and insists the CIA has broken no laws.

CISAC Co-Director Amy Zegart, an intelligence expert, tells Politico: “This is the most serious feud since the Intelligence committees were established."

Zegart, a former National Security Council staffer, answers questions about the dispute: 

Brennan said Feinstein's accusations of the CIA possibly violating the U.S. Constitution are "beyond the scope of reason." What's going on between these two?

This is a longstanding and before-now private, bitter fight over how the Senate Intelligence Committee is investigating the CIA's past detention and interrogation programs. The current controversy is about whether congressional staff illegally acquired CIA documents during the course of their investigation and whether the CIA illegally spied on those congressional staffers.

But the deeper fight is really about how history will record and judge the Bush administration's detention and interrogation policies. It's a complex battle that is tinged with politics. The Senate investigation began years ago as a bipartisan effort to examine these policies and their efficacy. Eventually, though, Republican members of the committee felt they could no longer participate. So we're now in a bizarre world where Democratic senators on the Intelligence Committee are feuding with a Democratic administration about investigating controversial policies practices that occurred under a Republican predecessor.

Feinstein calls the crisis a defining moment for the agency. Is it?

This is an extraordinary moment for CIA-congressional relations and the worst feud since the Church Committee investigation of CIA abuses in the 1970s. Oversight is always a delicate dance between intelligence officials who believe strongly in the importance of secrecy for carrying out their mission and lawmakers who believe strongly in the value of transparency to maintain the public trust. Intelligence officials never freely volunteer details of their agencies' activities. It's Congress's job to probe, to ask tough questions and demand good answers. 

But this is different than the usual tension between intelligence overseers and agencies. Feinstein isn't accusing the CIA of stonewalling or not telling the full truth. She is accusing the agency of spying on and intimidating her staff. That's totally out of bounds. For Feinstein, this conflict is Constitutional – raising serious questions about separation of powers and Congress's ability to check the executive's most powerful agencies. It is institutional, calling into question the role of her committee in particular. And it is personal. She is claiming that her own staff has been referred to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecution.

How serious is this for CIA Director Brennan, who vehemently denies the accusations and says no computers were hacked. 

The CIA is in big-time trouble. We may never know what actually happened in a basement room in Virginia where congressional staffers were reading millions of pages of CIA documents on computers. What matters more now is the political narrative. Ever since Edward Snowden – the former contractor for the National Security Agency – started releasing documents last June, the political narrative has been that U.S. intelligence agencies spy on and lie to just about everyone.

Much of this narrative is woefully distorted and just plain wrong. NSA is not out there listening to your calls with grandma. And there is still no evidence that NSA programs violated the law. But the narrative of distrust is powerful. Which is why Sen. Feinstein's charges against the CIA -- coming from one of the intelligence community's biggest defenders -- is so devastating.