Key Reflections
* The NYPD’s primary role is to protect New York City, but also support other cities
and nations through sharing intelligence, resources, and capabilities.
* Largely due to the pandemic, there is a growing problem involving young individuals who use terrorist tactics whilst conflating conspiracy theories and
personal grievances, mixed with mis—and dis—information online. They are ideologically agnostic.
* A fundamental distrust of institutions is often at the root of radicalisation and violence. This is a common facet many different groups share, which transcends
ideology.
* Information today is easily weaponized for nefarious purposes by state and non-state actors. It is crucial that the public is aware of this dynamic so that they can
better navigate the information landscape.
* Russia’s war in Ukraine is forcing law enforcement agencies to monitor asymmetrical and paramilitary groups that are being sourced by individuals who
seek military training and then return to their home countries.
* Women are increasingly taking on important positions in the national security arena, but more can be done with focused recruitment and dispel the myth that these
are career paths inimical to women. It is important to get more women into fields focused on dealing with the repercussions and implications of misogyny in terrorist
groups.
SG: Dr. Sajjan Gohel
RW: Rebecca Weiner
SG: Hello, and welcome to DEEP Dive, brought to you by NATO’s Defence Education Enhancement Programme. I’m your host, Dr. Sajjan Gohel. Each episode, we speak to experts and practitioners in international security and defence, counter-terrorism, and geopolitical current events to gain insight into the most pressing matters of global affairs.
In this episode we speak to Rebecca Ulam Weiner, the Assistant Commissioner for Intelligence Analysis at the New York City Police Department (NYPD). Rebecca manages counter-terrorism and cyber intelligence analysis and production for the NYPD’s Intelligence Bureau. She is one of the principal advisors to the NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence and Counterterrorism, and she shares responsibility for policy development and programme management. Rebecca also coordinates and integrates intelligence analysis and operations for one of the world’s largest law enforcement agencies.
Assistant Commissioner Rebecca Weiner, it is great to have you on NATO DEEP Dive.
RW: Thanks so much, Sajjan, I’m happy to be here.
SG: The New York Police Department (NYPD) is arguably one of the most well-known law enforcement agencies in the world, in large part because of all the TV shows that often depict the work that the police force does. But it would be great to get the perspective from a practitioner such as yourself. Could you explain and expand on the role of what the NYPD does when it comes to counter-terrorism and international security?
RW: Absolutely. So, while everybody knows what the NYPD is, the giant municipal law enforcement agency that has brought broad brand recognition from around the world, what people probably don’t know, is that we also have some 2,000 men and women who do counter-terrorism work as part or all of their day job. We have devoted tremendous resources towards the counter-terrorism missions since 9/11. We had resources that were focused on this area prior to 9/11, as well.
Our primary role is to protect the great city that we call home. But also, very importantly, we view our role as protecting other cities and towns across the country and around the world, by sharing our intelligence, and resources, and capabilities, with our partners. Because of the breadth and the depth of our programmes here, and because New York City has been a priority target for terrorism, across ideologies—and that’s an important part of it—we have unique insight into the terrorism threat. More importantly, we have a unique capability of mitigating it. So, we’ve had over 50 plots against this city in the last 20 years, some half of them in the last five. Unfortunately, we’ve also had our fair share of attacks. So, we’ve developed expertise through experience and that expertise is translatable beyond the NYPD.
SG: You’re the head of the Intelligence Bureau at the NYPD and that’s a very important role. And in many ways, it also, then, explains, to a degree, the challenges that you’re having to try and counter, that you’ve just outlined. But could you provide an overview of what you and your team does in terms of helping counter terrorism, and then also, as you mentioned, working with international partners as well?
RW: Sure, so, I in my role as assistant commissioner of intelligence analysis, oversee our analytic cadre, and I will give you a sense of what that means and what that is in a minute. But if we think back to this some 2000 people, across two bureaus, who are doing counter-terrorism work, of sorts, for the department, we have two primary bureaus who handle that work. Our Counter-Terrorism Bureau, which was established in the aftermath of 9/11, broadly speaking, performs protective deterrence and emergency response mission, as well as overseeing the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF). So, think about heavy weapons trained and armed personnel deployed around the city as needed, the bomb squad, chemical, biological, radioactive, nuclear explosives mitigation, [these are] specialised personnel who are deployed into precincts with special training, who can respond to incidents, things that are overt, that focus on deterrence, as well as defence in the case of an incident, and the JTTF, as I mentioned.
The Intel Bureau, which is where I work, has many roles, counter-terrorism is one of them. We also combat and investigate traditional crime, do extensive dignitary protection, which was the bulk of the mission prior to 9/11, as well as significant international engagement with law enforcement counterparts abroad. The primary mission for us is detection and disruption. So, at the most basic level, we do this by collecting information, turning that information into intelligence through analysis, and, to the extent that we can, sharing it. We collect information from the public, from our partners at the local level, the federal, and international levels, also, from the private sector, and from our own personnel. We have teams of analysts who as I mentioned, I oversee, who are married up with seasoned investigators and the job of these teams, of analysts and investigators, is to generate both tactical and strategic intelligence. So, some of it may advance a particular investigation, or suite of investigations, some of it may advance our understanding of a threat stream.
And we have a number of established networks and partnerships to share through. So, in our international liaison programme, we have 14 officers who are posted around the world, whose job it is to share best practices and resources and help understand the threat in the areas that they are focused. As well as our network of several hundred law enforcement agencies across the country, which we call sentry. And we’ve got another network of over 20,000 private sector partners that we call shield. So, we clearly take the sharing mission very seriously, though the investigative piece is always our bread and butter.
SG: That’s very interesting, how you unpack all the different dynamics of what the NYPD does and how important those different strands are, because ultimately, they’re all providing that information that fuses together. It makes me ask this question, because I’m curious about it—I know, we’ve discussed this before, and it’s a great story—but I’d love you to tell this story to the listeners of the podcast. How did you get involved in this field in the first place?
RW: Well, it was quite random. I think it was probably—as is the case with many things in life—equal parts happenstance and destiny. I’ve been working in the national security arena, but more at the academic policy level, focusing primarily on WMD related issues at the outset of my career as a young person at the Council on Foreign Relations, and then at the OECD in France, and then at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School. And I knew that I wanted to focus from the writing policy thinking side into ground truth work, I knew that I wanted it to be in the national security arena, and post 9/11 had become very interested in the counter-terrorism problems.
Then I came upon a great New Yorker article by William Finnegan that described the Intelligence Bureau, which at the time was in its fairly nascent stages of development. And then shortly thereafter, the police commissioner, Ray Kelly, came up to the Kennedy School to speak at a conference and describe the programme further and I thought, ‘well, this sounds like a fascinating place to spend a year or two.’ And I encourage anyone who’s listening to this, who is a young person, to heed this advice, I just said, ‘well, I’m going to go up and talk to him afterwards and ask him, whether it would make sense for somebody who’s new in their career to apply for a job there.’ And I did and a couple months later, I was hired. And I figured I would do it for two years, then move on, but I’ve loved it, and it’s been almost 16 years.
SG: So, that’s a great story, because it shows that you have to take the opportunity as in when it comes. So, you asked Commissioner Kelly about how you can get a job and that got the whole process started?
RW: It did. And it just always goes to show that, no matter what preconceived notions you might have about the evolution of your career, sometimes the best opportunities come just from keeping an open mind and following your interests.
SG: And that’s a very important life lesson. Seize the initiative, seize the moment. We’re living in very interesting and dangerous times in the post-pandemic era, or what is the new normal now. Could you provide an assessment of what you think the current threats are by terrorist groups, now? How have they started to look at the world in this period of the pandemic ending or us having to adjust to it?
RW: Well, Sajjan, you and I have talked about this a bunch, through your own work. And I think there’s almost a bit of nostalgia for the earlier years of our career when the threat was simpler, in many ways. So, when I started on board, looking at this issue, most of the focus was external, threats external to New York City, emanating from al-Qaeda and other foreign terrorist organisations. This started to shift around 2010 When we saw the emergence of homegrown violent extremism, enabled by the advent of social media platforms and the proliferation of English-speaking propagandists online, so that was our first major inflection point here. And then this all got hyper-charged in 2014, with the rise of ISIS and numbers of individuals who are seeking to travel overseas.
In 2017, added to this chorus, was the rise of the accelerationist neo-Nazi, what we call a racially and ethnically motivated, violent extremist threat. And then a couple of years ago, we started to see corollary anti-government extremists, from the opposite side of the political spectrum here. Now, most recently, and quite troubling to us here, is the introduction of individuals who use tactics that previously had been mostly the bread and butter of terrorists, who seem animated by conflicting conspiracy theories, and personal grievances mixed with mis—and dis—information online, to carry out acts of mass violence. And we saw this recently here in New York with the subway shooting earlier in the spring. We’ve seen it in a number of other cases across the country.
And this is important to view as a discordant symphony of threats. It’s not like one threat fades away, and a new one takes its spot. All of them are aggregated together. So, we’re now having to deal with al-Qaeda, ISIS, REMVE (racially and ethnically, motivated violent extremists) actors, anti-government actors, conspiracy theory motivated individuals, at the same time. And many of the tools that we’ve developed to deal with these issues are ideologically agnostic, you can apply it to one as well as the other. But it forces a degree of agility and an amount of resources that’s really difficult to maintain.
SG: So, you use the term ideologically agnostic as some of the challenges that are now being presented to us. How much has the pandemic played a role in that? In the sense of how its impacted-on people’s mental health, creating those conspiracies that you were also touching upon, and then perhaps this dynamic of the threat of using guns in attacks that are maybe ideologically motivated, but then also, perhaps, as you said, agnostic in terms of their ideological beliefs?
RW: It’s played a huge role. It’s interesting, though, because at first, we thought to ourselves, well, from a tourism perspective, the pandemic is going to reduce the availability of targets, because you didn’t have crowds of people gathered, you had a less hospitable environment for an actual attack. However, what we’re dealing with now, and I am fairly convinced that we’re going to be dealing with this for years to come, are the follow-on consequences of the pandemic, as you’ve just described. So, the mental health impact that spending so much time in lockdown has had, especially on younger individuals. And that’s a trend that we’ve noticed a lot recently, is youth actors. And these are youth actors who do tend to be somewhat more fluid in calling themselves a jihadist one day and a neo-Nazi the next, and not seeing anything inconsistent about that. So, mental health is a huge part of this.
Social media is a huge part of it. And again, if people are staying home, they’re spending a lot of time online. They’re consuming information from sources which are ranging from nearly unverified to malign interference by foreign nation states who are adversarial. So, there are plenty of opportunities for people to be radicalised to violence in a way that we just didn’t see a decade ago. And that, as they said, creates long lasting instability. There are all the economic factors of joblessness and this and that, that also compound these issues, but I think people were at home, in their basements or in their living rooms, feeling very vulnerable and fearful. And as such were presented as useful fools for terrorist organisations, or other adversarial actors, to feed information that is damaging too.
SG: Do you think that there has been an increase in the ability of lone actors or those that have been motivated by what they have seen, heard and watched online, in terms of their ability to carry out, not necessarily sophisticated attacks, but the attacks using IEDs that, in the past, were not always that possible? And what I mean by that is that pre-pandemic if someone was, say, motivated by ISIS, but they didn’t go to Iraq or Syria, and they tried to carry out an IED attack in the country that they were in, it tended to fail. They were missing a component; they didn’t quite know how to assemble the device. Whereas now, perhaps, has that gap in ability being resolved? Or is it that the tactics have just evolved based on opportunity?
RW: That’s a really interesting question. I think, as you know, concrete and reiterated guidance, coming out of both al-Qaeda and ISIS for the last decade plus, to use whatever you can, whenever you can, to carry out an attack. So, focusing on vehicle ramming, or edge weapon assaults, or gun violence, or fire as a weapon, the availability of the tactic becomes more important than the sophistication of it.
I don’t know whether the pandemic changes the equation from a tactical perspective, per se. It certainly has afforded people a lot of time on their hands to be learning about tactics that they may not have considered elsewhere. I do know that in New York, interestingly, when we did a look back last year, when it was the 20th anniversary of 9/11, plotting against the city and tactics, and targets, and ideologies. We found that, compared to other homegrown violent extremist cases across the country, our cases here tended to involve individuals who were looking to construct an IED. So that’s been a persistent interest, for whatever reason, in New York. Recently, we’ve had a number of acts of violence involving mass shootings.
So, I think it runs the gamut. And the firearms issue in this country is such an important one, the availability of firearms means that you will continue to see mass shootings that might be ideologically driven, or in many cases are not ideologically driven, as a tactic of choice.
SG: And in terms of the locations of an attack that could take place, we’ve seen terrible incidents on train stations and in supermarkets. How does one deal with that, in terms of having security but without it actually being an obstacle to people going about their daily lives? I guess it’s a very challenging dilemma that one has to face.
RW: Absolutely. I think it’s an issue that we are trying to sort through, literally as we speak. Our state legislature is currently in the process of drafting new laws that will constrain the ability of individuals to carry firearms in certain public places. Buffalo, the New York subway shooting, Uvalde, all within a fairly short time frame. [These were] incidents that—one clearly—we would describe as terrorism: the buffalo shooting. One we would more potentially describe as of the conspiracy theory minded violence, which was the Brooklyn subway. The tragic school shooting in Uvalde [is] in a different bucket altogether.
What they all do have in common is the modus operandi of a firearm. In a supermarket, a school, and a subway, those would be the three primary categories of places you would want to restrict firearms from being carried into. How do you protect a subway that 6 million people depend upon, to get on and off in New York City every day? You can’t actually have people going through magnetometers. So, here, I think technology and some political will are going to have to come together to help pardon targets that have been, by their nature, quite soft across the country, in a way that doesn’t make Americans and others feel that we are living in some kind of military state. We don’t want the security that protects us undermining our freedoms and our own sense of security as we walk around the street.
SG: Absolutely. If we pivot to state actors, what concerns you the most about what some countries are doing in the world to destabilise international security? And does that have ramifications also for New York City, with it being such a major international, global hub, economically, politically, and of course, socially, as well?
RW: Sure, and again, going back to the years post-9/11, a municipal law enforcement agency, the NYPD, creates this counter-terrorism mission, and our focus really is on foreign terrorist organisations, local level implications of this, and the local level implications of this became very clear, as we saw the rise of homegrown extremists and domestic extremists. So, why would the NYPD as a local law enforcement entity have to think really seriously about nation state adversaries, typically the domain of our federal counterparts? And here, I think we are in territory that we haven’t been in several decades. We’ve got a land war going on currently in Europe, and what will be the implications of that conflict to all of us going forward?
And so, at the outset, concern about other modalities of threat vectors, cyber being a huge one here. We were very focused on the issue of asymmetrical or paramilitary groups being sourced by individuals from our area here. So, in this case, in the case of the Russia war, individuals who might be in the neo-Nazi mindset who are going over to support both sides of the conflict was a concern. What happens when those people go seek, obtain military training and then come home? Are we going to be dealing with a situation like in Afghanistan several years from now where you do have all these people who’ve gotten fighting experience; after the hot phase of the war dies down, who’s going to be left training and fighting? And what will be their interest in focusing on the US and elsewhere across the West? So, there’s one that is a huge preoccupation.
But also, an entity like Russia, who has demonstrated an ability to meddle with elections, disseminate disinformation, churn up civil unrest within our country. We are experiencing some of the dividends of that activity right now as we speak. And that’s one, but there are others. And we think about Iran and its activities and the threat that it posed. So, in addition to all of the threats that we talked about earlier, this one is gaining in prominence, even for an agency like the NYPD, charged with protecting New York City as a world global capital of finance and everything else than New York City is.
SG: I find that increasingly when I speak to people in federal and municipal law enforcement agencies, they often talk about this balance that exists between dealing with threats such as terrorism, and then also threats from state actors. And they all seem to be saying that increasingly, it’s the state actor dynamic that is becoming bigger and not necessarily the only priority, but it is becoming more of the discussion and the challenge. Is that something that New York is also having to deal with?
RW: Well, yes, and we deal with it in an interesting way, which is that our concern here is that the nation state threat vector does not devote too many resources away from counter-terrorism. We have extensive capabilities and resources here in New York, and we have an international footprint, and we intersect with international law enforcement constantly. But we have our limitations as a local law enforcement agency, and if other partners become too focused on nation state actors and threats to the preclusion of CT,
we’re concerned about that. And we’re now faced with a situation around the world where you’ve got simultaneous theatres of conflict—Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, obviously, Africa—ungoverned spaces in a moment where people are shifting resources away from those conflicts and those threats to deal with the nation state issue. And will that leave us blind and vulnerable to a CT threat that emerges from what we considered to be conflicts that are over, and some have moved on from. We are quite concerned about that.
SG: This is another dynamic, of course, why intelligence and information is so critical and to be able to act in real time. So let me ask you a question that a very wise person asked me recently, as in you, I’m going to turn it around. Are there benefits or disadvantages in the declassification of intelligence, such as what was done to show Russia’s intentions towards Ukraine before the war began? Because we saw that the U.S. and the U.K. took an unprecedented step to declassify intelligence, specifically showing what Russia’s intentions were. And there was often this debate about whether that was the right thing to do. In many ways, it proved to be true, because Russia was exposed. But then there were also those that spoke about the concern that it could actually impact on future intelligence gathering operations. But where would you stand on this?
RW: I think as a bystander, right, who is far from the insight into the decision-making process that led to this strategy, I think it was a fascinating strategy. And I applaud it and hope that it allayed some of the concerns that often keep information that the American public should know that would inform the way they think about the world hidden, due to concerns about how the information was obtained, etc. And it is obviously of paramount importance to protect sources and methods of information in order to preserve your ability to collect future information. However, taking that leap and saying some of this stuff really needs to get out there was an incredibly potent, I think, counter to the information warfare that Russia was trying to conduct. And this is a strategy that I hope we can see replicated in a safe and appropriate way and in other conflicts. And I think the public is smart and sophisticated enough to be able to take onboard this information. And it also helps, I think, importantly, gain their trust at a moment in time. And going back to what the threat landscape looks like now, and how it’s different from how it was 15, 20 years ago, at the root of a lot of these ideologies, and at the root of a lot of the violence that we’ve seen in recent years is a fundamental distrust that people have in institutions—whether it’s the government, whether it’s science, whether it’s the medical establishment, whether it’s law enforcement, people don’t trust institutions, and in some cases, they don’t trust institutions enough that they’re willing to carry out acts of violence. And so, institutions can help strengthen the trust that Americans and others have, our public has, in them by being slightly more transparent with what they’re seeing and why they’re making the decisions that they’re making.
SG: Very important answer that you’ve given. Certainly, you answered it far better than I was able to! And I think it just shows actually how important what you’re saying is in terms of trying to address that trust deficit that is often there, when some people look at how governments respond to information or react. And I think it was important also for the purposes of transparency. From an academic perspective, I would say that declassifying the intelligence is also useful for many of us to do our research and also help to verify what actually exists within the open-source world as well. So, it was an important step. And it would be interesting to see how that unfolds and develops when it comes to ongoing problems with Russia and also perhaps other potential theatres of conflict and challenge that may emerge. Do you feel that this is something that we will potentially see more in the future, when it comes to declassifying intelligence?
RW: I don’t know, I eagerly await the answer to your question as a consumer of information that’s both in the public domain and the non-public domain. But I think we are just increasingly seeing how important information is, which sounds like a fairly naive thing to say, but the ease with which information can be manipulated, weaponized, turned against the public, dividing the public. It’s something that I don’t think the average member of the public appreciated until several years ago, or a few years ago, I should say, if they do today. And so having the ability to parse your sources, understand where things come from, is important, whether that’s due to the federal government declassifying intelligence and disseminating it, or law enforcement explaining clearly what happened when, and we see this play out in the realm of policing, with conversations surrounding the release of body camera footage of police-involved shootings and other incidents, right, there’s now this almost expectation of transparency from the government when it comes to a really important or complicated set of issues. So, on the one hand, you’ve got that stream of, really we do have, as a member of the public, we deserve to know what happened, and what’s informing decision-making. And on the other hand, there’s a growing awareness of the perils of disseminating information that is inaccurate and what that can do, from a physical perspective, not just in the online world.
SG: Well, once again, you raise very important points. And in many ways, this does help to challenge the disinformation and the propaganda and the half-truths that some state entities want to keep churning out, which often also don’t get answered or counted. And then those perceptions will then feed into those conspiracy theories that we were talking about earlier. So, I think we’re at a very important juncture as to what is now happening in terms of how governments in our respective countries react to the challenges and try to almost stay ahead of the information dynamic and keep people involved and aware as to what’s unfolding.
One final part of the discussion is to look at the role of women in law enforcement. And we’ve seen that women have been absolutely essential when it comes to counter-terrorism, to international security. You are a very clear illustration of that. You have incredible analysts that work under you, I’ve seen that when you very kindly hosted me in New York in the past. Then there’s also this belief that we still haven’t reached that stage within, say, the Five Eyes and within the wider European Union, where there is enough female representation in these types of positions when it comes to intelligence, security, and counter-terrorism. In your opinion, where are we at when it comes to having more women in this field? And also, what more can be done to encourage women to be involved?
RW: Well, thank you, first of all, for all of that; it’s a really important issue. And we’ve certainly seen a lot of change, even over the last two decades that I’ve been in this field. In this country, we now have a female vice president, we in New York have a female police commissioner for the first time, we’ve had female directors of the CIA, female director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). A number of women take on incredibly important positions in the national security arena and in the physical security arena. So, things, I think, are improving. But it is an industry that has consistently been male-dominated, and we could do more. Part of that comes from focused recruitment. And I think it’s important for women who are in these positions to tell the young woman that was me 16 years ago, that is somebody today, this is an incredibly rewarding career path for you, and it’s an area where your contributions will be felt immediately, having that sense of mission every day, never a boring day, and incredibly supportive workplace. And I think that is probably the most misunderstood of all of the reasons that women wouldn’t necessarily enter into this field, in the sense that, “Oh, I wouldn’t be welcome here,” and that, luckily, has not been my experience. And, you know, other women have faced many challenges in their own workplaces, but I think it can be an incredibly supportive environment that you’re dealing with important issues every day in a way that you can experience the impact you make directly. So, feeling like I can go to work every day and help contribute to the safety of this city has motivated me for the last 16 years. And that’s true of men and of women. But I think it’s important to start really concertedly dispelling the myth that this is a career path that is inimical to women.
And you have focused on the issue of misogyny in terrorism in a way that I found really eye-opening when we first had our discussions about this topic. And even more important to get more women into a field that is focused on dealing with the various repercussions and implications of misogyny in terrorist groups. And it’s a subtle but incredibly important insight that what unites a lot of terrorist groups across ideologies is a subordination of and projection of violence against women. So how best to counter that from a counter-terrorism mission-set perspective is to bring more women onboard to make sure that that we do.
SG: That’s essential, and it’s going to be even more important, I would say, in the environment that we are at, that we have more women in the field. And it’s worth remembering as to the fact that women have actually been essential to some of the most important counter-terrorism operations. It was many women within the CIA that ultimately found Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan. I don’t think it necessarily gets the attention that it should. And of course, there are so many incredible women, as you mentioned, in the NYPD, that have been very important in terms of providing security, and also countering the threats that have existed inside not just New York, but I think wider when it comes to having to cooperate with allies and international agencies.
You spoke about that aspect about misogyny and its connection to terrorism. And yes, it’s certainly something that I’m looking at a lot. Are you concerned about what’s going on, say, in Afghanistan right now, when we are seeing the fact that the rights of women are completely being eroded and taken away, the Taliban have reneged on promises of women being educated, they are being stopped from working? Do you think that that could potentially act as a beacon for the recruitment of or the arrival of foreign fighters, as we’ve seen in the past, whether it was Afghanistan in the ‘90s, or Iraq and Syria post-Arab Spring? Do you have fears that this could be another wave of young men that are motivated by misogyny and potentially the ideological component to that, that could be drawn to Afghanistan?
RW: Absolutely. I’m incredibly concerned about all of that. And you’re taking generations of women, subjugating them to a feat that is extraordinarily dire, unfair, unjust. And these are also the mothers of future victims of terrorism or terrorists themselves, the brothers and sisters and wives, so it is impossible to take 50% of your population and subordinate it, deprive it of rights, of equality, of justice, and not expect generational problems to come. And I think when we think about the future, and the conflicts and the threats that we’re all going to be dealing with, increasingly you see, not just episodic violence that demands a particular set of policy outcomes to quell, right, or, “Oh, if only it was a question of counter-messaging,” or, you know, “If only it was a question of our response to a particular area of the world.” But now, I think these deep-rooted conflicts that will play out over generations, Afghanistan is one, I would certainly describe what’s happening in Ukraine and the war with Russia as another. A third would be the interaction of technology and the disinformation/misinformation/information warfare that we were talking about earlier. So how will all of that be enabled by artificial intelligence and other technological developments? And climate change, right, and the civil unrest and resource scarcity and mass migration flows. All of these threats are not near-term, or even medium-term, but long-term, and they all compound one another. So, we are going to be dealing with the intersection of these threats for many years to come. And it’s going to require us to be incredibly deliberate and thoughtful about how we approach any one of them.
SG: Yes, and how we approach them may also, I suppose, potentially require interconnectivity as well, as they do potentially correspond with each other, depending on the location and the time, that they, I suppose, become more significant over the passage of time. I’m probably not being very articulate to what I’m trying to say!
So Rebecca, one final thing, is there any last thought that you’d want to give when it comes to where you see international security, any issues that you want to provide a reminder to people about, not to be complacent about, or what to watch, where we should be paying attention to that perhaps doesn’t get enough attention outside the bubble of law enforcement and those that work directly in the field?
RW: Following on to all of that, these kind of big threats—Afghanistan, Russia war, climate change and the national security implications that that will create around the world, technology and its intersection with the information war, all of that—I think a really important thing that we cannot overlook is how young the individuals are who increasingly frequently come across our transom. And that’s not just in the terrorism world. We see it in the terrorism world, we see it among neo-Nazis, among anti-government extremists, we see it among jihadists. We also see it in the traditional crime context. The individuals who are carrying out acts of violence are getting younger and younger. And for all of us, this should give us pause. And yes, part of that is the hangover from the pandemic and the implications of mental health crisis that it inflicted on people. But today’s violent offender is not tomorrow’s productive citizen. And this creates cycles. And also, equally importantly, from our perspective as law enforcement and intelligence, dealing with youth is a much more complicated scenario than dealing with an older violent offender. And one has to be incredibly adroit in what tools and what resources you bring to bear. So, our young people are really telling us something through some of this violence. It is an appeal for help, it’s an appeal for institutions that they trust, that can be helpful, that can right some of these courses that I see going awry. So, the issue of youth offenders and of mental health is incredibly important for all of us to pay attention to.
SG: Absolutely, I think that is one thing that we definitely need to focus on and look at in greater detail and definitely gives us, as you mentioned, pause for thought. Well, Assistant Commissioner Rebecca Weiner, thank you so much, once again, for being part of this NATO DEEP Dive podcast. We’re very grateful that you could spend the time with us.
RW: I’m delighted, thank you so much for having me, and I look forward to continuing the conversation.
SG: Absolutely. We look forward to having you back.
Thank you for listening to this episode of DEEP Dive. I’m your host, Dr. Sajjan Gohel. DEEP Dive is brought to you by NATO’s Defence Education Enhancement Programme. The production and research team are Marcus Andreopoulos and Victoria Jones. For additional content, including full transcripts of each episode, please visit: deepportal.hq.nato.int/deepdive.
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This transcript has been edited for clarity.