Mr Clint Watts joins the Cognitive Crucible and gives an FBI-perspective on domestic extremism. The conversation references a recent article on Clint’s Selected Wisdom substack: Virtual Insanity to Real World Calamity: “How Will Lies Power Domestic Terrorism in 2021?” Clint asserts that domestic terrorist groups are far from homogeneous. Particularly worrisome are young, largely single, largely male, “stochastic haters” who tend to be committed to violence and are accelerating destabilizing trajectories. Clint unpacks the landscape, discusses hard trade-offs between security and privacy, and provides some policy recommendations.
LinkedIn, Books and Other Web Links:
- Cognitive Crucible Podcast Episodes Mentioned
- Selected Wisdom Substack
- Clint Watts Wikipedia Page
- Virtual Insanity to Real World Calamity: How Will Lies Power Domestic Terrorism in 2021?
- How Can America Counter Domestic Extremism?
- President Biden’s New Plan to Counter Domestic Terrorism: A Step Forward
- Messing with the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News by Clint Watts
- Justin Hendrix on Tech Policy Press
- Moonshot
- Podcast Topics of Interest: We would be delighted to have experts onto the podcast to discuss topics like these:
- How societies form and sustain
- New myths for the Information Age
- The role of institutions and society
- “Know thy Enemy”: Key cyber and information scholars from China, Russia, Iran, and elsewhere
- Information Technology/Operational Technology (IT-OT) convergence
- Dissertation & Thesis presentations related to information
- Reflexive control & the algebra of consciousness (Vladimir Lefevbre)
- IO in Space
- Information maneuver
- A dive into each of China’s three warfares (three separate episodes)
- What about Africa?
- What about India?
- IO attack vectors in games & apps
- IO & dopamine
- Diaspora
- Ideas as contagion
- Enactivism and Cybernetics 2.0: how we interact with our environment & vice versa
- Cognitive immunity
- Different types of social media bad actors: trolls, bots, cyborgs
- In Athena’s Camp: A walk through DoD’s efforts to grapple with the Info Revolution 1991-2020
- NCTC: Moving from Catch/Kill to an Info-Centric Effort?
- The Evolution of IO/IW/OIE Organizations in the Services (some have spoken about this obliquely but not why)
- NATO’s Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence (SCCoE): Mission and Impact
- The Future of Journalism: Printed Dailies or Substack and What Does it Mean for an Open Democratic Society
- Fast Forward 100 Years: What does it really mean to playing the long game?
- Cultural components and vulnerabilities
- Weaknesses associated with democracies and open societies
- How to best market The West to the rest of the World
Guest Bio: Clint Watts is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He previously was an infantry officer in the United States Army, and was the Executive Officer of the Combating Terrorism Center at United States Military Academy at West Point. Additionally, he was a Special Agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation where he served on the Joint Terrorism Task Force. He’s also the author of: “Messing with the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News.”
About: The Information Professionals Association (IPA) is a non-profit organization dedicated to exploring the role of information activities, such as influence and cognitive security, within the national security sector and helping to bridge the divide between operations and research. Its goal is to increase interdisciplinary collaboration between scholars and practitioners and policymakers with an interest in this domain.
For more information, please contact us at communications@information-professionals.org.
Or, connect directly with The Cognitive Crucible podcast host, John Bicknell, on LinkedIn.
Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, 1) IPA earns from qualifying purchases, 2) IPA gets commissions for purchases made through links in this post.
