Terrorism has become increasingly homegrown since 9/11

The devastating terror attack on Sept. 11, 2001 exposed the need for a strong counter-terrorism effort in the United States. Since then, the government has ramped up efforts to fight terrorism abroad and at home.

In response to the terror attacks, then governor Bob Holden established the Missouri Office of Homeland Security, the first of its kind in the nation.

“It wasn’t a very effective program,” said former Homeland Security director Paul Fennewald. “They didn’t have a lot of funding or the ability to do a lot with the resources they had.”

When he assumed office in 2005, former governor Matt Blunt moved the program into the Department of Public Safety. This allowed for better coordination between the Department of Public Safety agencies that do much of the daily work that makes up homeland security.

Some Missourians said Monday they thought that while 9/11 changed the way the United States gathered intelligence and caused more people to be aware, it may have gone too far.

“I think that America is more paranoid now,” said Columbia resident Steve Markley.

But Jac Durk, another Columbia resident, said he thought the world was much more dangerous now.

“We have a lot more evil in the world than we did 16 years ago and it prevails more,” he said. “I think the American people have taken a lot more precautions to what’s going on in the world.”

Fennewald said the threat of terrorism is as great now as it has ever been although the landscape of terrorism has changed.

Sept. 11 was an organized and elaborate attack from overseas with many moving parts. But as the United States takes down terror organizations and their operatives, Fennewald said the threat has become increasingly homegrown.

“As we’ve evolved from that period of time, we’ve seen more and more attacks being carried out by lone individuals, traditionally called the lone wolf,” he said. “They subscribed to some radical ideology, be it right or left, and they make plans to act on that to do something terrible against the United States or citizens of the United States.

According to the Institute for Economics and Peace, which measures the global terrorism index, Fennewald is right on the money. In 2016, the group found that half of all plots with an ISIL connection have been conducted by people who have had no direct contact with ISIL.

The Department of Homeland Security puts out a bulletin that highlights the continuing threat from homegrown terrorists, many of whom “are inspired online to violence by foreign terrorist organizations.”

Take, for example, Robert Hester Jr. Hester was arrested in February after the FBI began monitoring his social media posts and found he expressed hate towards the United States. Hester is a U.S. citizen born in Missouri and was even enlisted in the Army in 2012. He had planned a terror attack with an undercover agent that was going to happen on Presidents Day in Kansas City. Hester had agreed to bomb buses, trains and a train station there.

“We’ve seen this diffusion from centralized organization to a kind of fly by the seat of your pants terrorist attack,” said Fennewald. “While they may not be as overwhelming or as elaborate as the attacks of Sept. 11, they’re still effective at causing a lot of panic and a lot of fear in people’s lives.”

But Fennewald said people need to realize the U.S. is a very safe place but the community needs to have a heightened sense of what’s going on around them.

“Maybe it’s just being a little bit educated on what suspicious activity looks like and then knowing what to do with that information should you happen onto something that doesn’t look quite right,” he said.

One way to report activity that seems suspicious is a free phone app called See Something, Send Something. You can send a photo or write a note about any activity you think is suspicious and it gets sent immediately to the closest intelligence center and the analysts there decide which law enforcement agency to alert. You can download the app here.

Schools can also be targeted. This is a link to the SchoolsWatch facebook page SchoolsWatch facebook page and it has helpful information to promote safety of students and faculty, including the warning signs of terrorism. Fennewald said the idea of SchoolsWatch is to empower parents and the community to accept some of the responsibility for school safety.