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This chapter on terrorism prevention provides the reader with an overview of the various terrorist prevention organizations within the United States at the federal, state, and local levels. It is divided into two different sections, the first providing a detailed description of various federal agencies involved in terrorism prevention and an overview of how state and local agencies fit within the federal framework. The second section of this chapter describes various efforts to integrate these disparate organizations into a cohesive effort to prevent terrorism activities. This chapter concludes with some suggestions for future consideration to help with the overall terrorism prevention effort.

In this chapter, we provide a brief historical framework of the events and policy changes that impacted the prosecution of terrorism over the past 50 years with emphasis placed on the changes that resulted from the 9/11 attacks.

We provide a review of relevant literature and complete the chapter by providing new data (2015) on case outcomes derived from the American Terrorism Study, a database housed in the Terrorism Research Center in Fulbright College, at the University of Arkansas.

Investigative and prosecutorial authority in U.S. terrorism cases has experienced ebbs and flows that correspond with terrorism attacks as well as missteps by the FBI, and each has impacted the success of prosecution efforts. Despite dramatic changes, the number of cases prosecuted after 9/11 is unprecedented, and conviction rates continue to climb.

This chapter provides the reader with a synopsis of the policy changes that have occurred in federal terrorism investigations and trials from the late 1960s upto the present. Based on that context, we provide an explanation of how those policy changes have impacted terrorism prosecutions.

It is commonly claimed that the entrapment defense has never succeeded in a terrorism case. Yet that is not precisely true. In several post-9/11 cases, entrapment claims have contributed to full or partial acquittals, hung juries, and unexpectedly lenient sentences. Prosecutors have also dropped charges, setting convicted defendants free, to prevent successful entrapment defenses upon retrial. This chapter concludes that, despite the fragility and ambiguity of the right not to be entrapped, entrapment claims can achieve partial victories even in terrorism cases, due to the multiple discretion points at which entrapment can inform strategic or normative judgments.

Despite its stated intention to be independent, impartial and thorough, the 9-11 Commission was none of the three. The Commission was structurally compromised by bias-inducing connections to subjects of the investigation, and procedurally compromised, among other reasons, by (1) its failure to take up promising lines of inquiry and its failure to try to force the release of key documents that were closely guarded by the Bush administration, the FBI and various intelligence agencies; (2) its distortion of information about pre-9-11 military preparedness, foreknowledge of the attacks or attacks of like-kind; and (3) omissions of information related to the funding of the plot and the specific whereabouts of key officials on the morning of September 11, 2001.

These structural compromises and procedural failings converged to assure that the Commission would not challenge core elements of the “official story” of the 9-11 attacks. This failure was compounded by the Commission's desire to produce a final report that would read as a “historical narrative” rather than as an exhaustive set of findings on the critical unanswered questions that arose after the attacks. The Commission's unquestioning acceptance of the official narrative also meant that it missed a perhaps larger opportunity to challenge key myths associated with American exceptionalism. Thus, the 9-11 Commission ultimately functioned as an instrument of cultural hegemony, extending and deepening the official version of events under the guise of independence and impartiality.

Machiavelli's dictums in The Prince (1977) instigated the modern discourse on power. Arguing that “there's such a difference between the way we really live and the way we ought to live that the man who neglects the real to study the ideal will learn to accomplish his ruin, not his salvation” (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 44), his approach is a realist one. In this text, Machiavelli (1977, p. 3) endeavors to “discuss the rule of princes” and to “lay down principles for them.” Taking his lead, Foucault (1978, p. 97) argued that “if it is true that Machiavelli was among the few…who conceived the power of the Prince in terms of force relationships, perhaps we need to go one step further, do without the persona of the Prince, and decipher mechanisms on the basis of a strategy that is immanent in force relationships.” He believed that we should “investigate…how mechanisms of power have been able to function…how these mechanisms…have begun to become economically advantageous and politically useful…in a given context for specific reasons,” and, therefore, “we should…base our analysis of power on the study of the techniques and tactics of domination” (Foucault, 1980, pp. 100–102). Conceptualizing such techniques and tactics as the “art of governance”, Foucault (1991), examined power as strategies geared toward managing civic populations through shaping people's dispositions and behaviors.

Following the financial crisis, across the Western world, defense budgets have undergone substantial and far-reaching cuts. But in the emerging markets there has been a significant rise in defense expenditure (DE). Countries such as China, Brazil, and India have doubled or even tripled their defense spending during the past two decades. It has been generally argued that terrorism can potentially affect economic growth adversely in the short run through a number of channels. Terrorist attacks can increase uncertainty which limits the scope for domestic investments and also diverts foreign direct investment. In order to mitigate terrorism, increased government spending on security can crowd out more growth-enhancing public and private investments in social sectors such as health and education, which in turn may affect the long run growth of a nation. Terrorism also hinders growth by raising the cost of doing business in terms of higher wages, larger insurance premiums, and greater security expenditures. These higher costs result in reduced profits and, thus, smaller return on investment. Terrorist attacks can also destroy infrastructure, thereby leading to business disruptions. This study attempts to examine both the short- (SR) and long-run (LR) associations among terrorism, DE, and its impact on GDP taking time series evidence, using autoregressive distributed lag model (ARDL) model from some selected countries of Asia – India, China, Bangladesh, and Pakistan – during 1990 to 2014. The results show that there are LR associations among the three variables for Pakistan only.

In general, the security situation for China’s sports pageants is quite stable, but still China needs to face up to the threats from both traditional and nontraditional security areas such as terrorism, separatism, and extremism. Terrorism is the biggest threat to China’s sports pageants. Effective security and defense strategies for the games require reliable intelligence. Reliable intelligence, however, is notoriously difficult to obtain even though we are immersed in vast quantities of information. How can we identify and obtain the useful intelligence from the vast sea of other less useful information? After analyzing the potential terrorism attacks and terrorists in the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and the 2010 Guangzhou Asian Games, this chapter analyzes the potential means for counterterrorism at the games and tries to set up an intelligence study system based on the Information Galaxy (IG), which includes five parts of Sun (S), Earth (E), Moon (M), Information Sharing Environment (ISE), and IG. The relationships of SEM are just like the Sun, the Earth, and the Moon. All the methods especially need to cooperate in the study of different cases in the IG system until valuable intelligence can be produced from the S, the S-E, the S-E-M, or the S-E-Ms. This chapter does not expect to put forward a complete and careful theoretical system of terrorism and Intelligence-led counterterrorism in China, but it still tries to establish a relatively complete theoretical framework, with a multi-disciplinary perspective of peace science, national defense economics, information science, and computer science, etc.

The sudden rise of the socio-political importance of security that has marked the twenty-first century entails a commensurate empowerment of the intelligence apparatus. This chapter takes the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 as a vantage point from where to address the political significance of this development. It provides an account of the powers the Act grants intelligence agencies, concluding that it effectively legalizes their operational paradigm. Further, the socio-legal dynamics that informed the Act lead the chapter to conclude that Intelligence has become a dominant apparatus within the state. This chapter pivots at this point. It seeks to identify, first, the reasons of this empowerment; and, second, its effects on liberal-democratic forms, including the rule of law. The key reason for intelligence empowerment is the adoption of a pre-emptive security strategy, geared toward neutralizing threats that are yet unformed. Regarding its effects on liberal democracy, the chapter notes the incompatibility of the logic of intelligence with the rule of law. It further argues that the empowerment of intelligence pertains to the rise of a new threat-based governmental logic. It outlines the core premises of this logic to argue that they strengthen the anti-democratic elements in liberalism, but in a manner that liberalism is overcome.