By Blake Ursch
NCITE Strategic Communications Manager

After two days hearing from some of the nation’s leading minds studying terrorism and violent extremism, the man at the mic said it all.

“My brain is full,” said Sam Howerton, Ph.D., chief scientist for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, in his closing remarks at NCITE’s ENVISION24 conference.

For the second time, NCITE invited its consortium of expert researchers – spread across more than 30 partner institutions in the U.S. and Europe – and its board of interagency government officials to gather in Omaha to share their unique perspectives on some of the world’s most complex and pressing challenges.

ENVISION24, held June 25-27 on the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s (UNO) Scott Campus, drew almost 150 in-person attendees and more than 200 online viewers. In addition to serving as a platform for knowledge sharing, the conference provided an opportunity to celebrate NCITE’s growth over its first four years as DHS’s Center of Excellence for terrorism and targeted violence.

‘We Collaborate, We Communicate, We Cooperate’

The event began June 25 with a workshop for early career researchers (ECRs) from throughout the NCITE consortium. Later in the evening, the Center hosted a ribbon cutting to mark the official opening of its new headquarters in Omaha’s Scott Technology Center.

The event included remarks from university leaders, including Jeffrey Gold, M.D., now president of the University of Nebraska System; UNO Chancellor Joanne Li, Ph.D., CFA; and Chris Kabourek, MBA, formerly interim president of the NU system.

U.S. Sen. Pete Ricketts, who, as governor of Nebraska, helped UNO secure the grant that established NCITE in 2020, also spoke to the audience of about 200.

“Here in Nebraska, one of the things we do really well – we collaborate, we communicate, we cooperate,” he said, remarking on NCITE’s role as a partner in a larger academic and government network focused on national security. “And this is a team effort.”

The ceremony concluded with NCITE students from an array of academic backgrounds – Jack Rygg (IT Innovation), Ryan Vilter (political science), Kalyn Wettengel (business), Callie Vitro (criminology), Alexis d’Amato (I-O psychology), and Anthony Roberson (I-O psychology) – cutting the red ribbon together.

NCITE students and faculty then led guests on guided tours, which included stops in the new Student Security Operations Center (sSOC) where students monitor live traffic on the NU system network to identify and shut down cyberattacks. Guests also toured NCITE’s Behavioral Research Laboratory, where they learned how eye tracking software can be used to aid counterterrorism research.

Emerging Threats and Galvanizing Events

ENVISION24 began in earnest on June 26 with a meeting of NCITE’s Board of Directors, which includes members from DHS, the Department of State, and the Department of Justice.

As the audience filed into the Scott Conference Center, they passed research posters created by NCITE students from throughout the consortium, who later had the opportunity to present their work to the seasoned academics and government practitioners in attendance.

Day 2 kicked off with a virtual keynote address from the White House’s Jen Daskal, J.D., deputy homeland security advisor and deputy assistant to the president. Daskal spoke about the government’s priorities in addressing the international and domestic homeland security threat.

Internationally, Daskal said, the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks and the ensuing conflict in Gaza have galvanized many foreign terrorist groups and have broadened the pool of potential recruits.

At home, Daskal said, the government is focused on the threat posed by racially and ethnically motivated violent extremists (RMVEs) and from those inspired by foreign terrorist groups, such as ISIS and Al-Qaida.

“With threats growing now more than ever, we need the work of social and behavioral scientists to help us do counterterrorism and to do prevention well,” she said to the audience. “I wanted to use my voice to urge all of you to continue to do the really important work you do and share your results with us.”

Throughout the rest of the conference, the audience heard about NCITE’s ongoing research projects, organized into eight different sessions of panel presentations. Day 2 included sessions on modern terrorist threats to the U.S., extremist use of emerging technology, changes in terrorist behavior, challenges in prosecuting domestic terrorism and managing ideological offenders after release, and threats associated with the U.S. election.

The final session of the day, which covered the upcoming election, included presentations from NCITE researchers Bettina Rottweiler, Ph.D.; Pete Simi, Ph.D.; and Chris Bader, Ph.D.

Bader, a professor of sociology at Chapman University, spoke about the challenges of surveying Americans’ tolerance for political violence. Many surveys that examine this question, Bader said, are improperly weighted toward responses that indicate support for violence.

When researchers examine the issue with carefully worded questions that ask about specific intent, Bader said, the level of support for violence appears to be much less than the numbers that often dominate headlines.

Somebody asked if there was going to be good news today,” Bader told the audience. “I would say that based on these questions, based on how they’re asked, that you start to get down to numbers … of less than 1% being willing to engage in violence.”

‘We Will Be Ready’

NCITE Director Gina Ligon, Ph.D., kicked off the final day of the conference by pointing out highlights from the first day of presentations.

“There are two things that I’m fiercely protective about as the director of this center. One is the scientific rigor of everything that gets in front of a government board member’s desk. And two is the ardent focus on the CT mission,” Ligon said. “What I heard yesterday was the fruit of that labor.”

Ligon identified key priorities for NCITE research moving forward. She noted three: Threats to cyber critical infrastructure, the role academia can play advising the tech sector on the threat of new technologies, and the far-reaching effects of the Oct. 7 attack in Israel.

The final day of presentations included sessions on novel threat assessment, innovations in measurement and analysis, and NCITE’s efforts to build a stronger counterterrorism workforce – now and in the future.

In the final session, “Transformative Workforce Development,” Stacey Conchie, Ph.D., director of the Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats (CREST), spoke about the International Academic Partnerships for Science and Security (IAPSS) consortium. IAPSS is a collaborative effort between NCITE and CREST to build an international network of academic researchers focused on terrorism and security issues.

“There’s only so much that we can each achieve as an individual country,” Conchie said. “We can achieve much more if we work together on an international level.”

The day also featured keynote remarks from Nick Rasmussen, counterterrorism coordinator for DHS, who offered details on the current threat environment in the U.S. homeland and the tools at the government’s disposal to “mitigate and manage risk.”

“Despite the fact that we’ve had enormous counterterrorism successes … the homeland threat that we’re facing today somehow seems more challenging, more complex, more complicated than it’s ever been,” Rasmussen said.

In particular, Rasmussen pointed to fractured U.S. politics as a critical weakness facing the country.

“The toxic political environment in which we live as Americans right now, and the existentialist ways in which voices in our public square frame our politics – not only in zero-sum terms, but the worst kind of zero-sum terms – all of that leaves us far more vulnerable than ever to targeted violence here motivated by sets of different extreme political beliefs,” he said.

In her morning remarks, Ligon stressed the importance of the work being done in the NCITE consortium. In an era in which attention has largely shifted toward U.S. conflicts with state actors like Russia and China, she said, the researchers gathered there in the Scott Conference Center were holding line against the terrorism threat.

“The federal government may have stopped worrying about terrorism, as reflected in their budget, but terrorism has not stopped thinking about us. It’s going to happen again,” she said. “And when it does, we, this center, the researchers here, will have the answers and the research that everyone will be asking for. We will be here. We will be ready.”