Thank you all very much for coming, particularly given the weather outside today. One does get soaked, yes. But this is a very important subject and I'm glad that you've made the time to come and join us. Osmot Khan and David Sturman both work in this field. Osmot is a fellow here at New America, a future of war fellow. As part of the program we have jointly with Arizona State University, David works in the international security program here. And the international security program I think has a long history of using systematically gathered data to make irrefutable points about subjects of acrimony as public debate as things like this are. I think this travel ban is one of the things that makes me personally just sort of ashamed to be a person. It is indefensible but just documenting just how indefensible it is is something that David has done a tremendous job of doing along with colleagues here at New America. So I think the way we will do this is Osmot will speak first and just give us a little bit of the historical overview because for all of the fact that this is a sort of uniquely terrible bit of public policy, it's also not without precedent and that understanding of how we came to a point where the US government was willing and able to try and implement a policy like this is worth hearing. And then David will speak a bit about documenting exactly in what ways we can think of the travel ban as being effective or not. And I think you will find a very clear answer to the question that's posed in the title of this discussion. And then we'll come back to Osmot to speak a bit more and then open it up. We are an intimate group so we can have a discussion amongst ourselves and the folks who are joining us online as well. So thank you and Osmot. Thanks, Constantine. So we might think of the travel ban as Constantine just indicated as unprecedented in many ways but there is a relatively recent and long history of immigration-related legislation of different kinds, of rules of different kinds that have been in effect in response to terrorism. And this concept of terrorism is relatively new as well. And it's important to keep in mind that pre-the 1970s and instances like the Munich attacks, it wasn't used in the lexicon the way that it began to emerge to be used. The Munich attacks just in case anybody- Yeah, so on the Olympics. The Munich Olympics when individuals who wanted to make a point about the Palestinian cause killed a number of people at the Munich Olympics. Israeli athletes, specifically. Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. And so in the years since you saw an interest in this issue, you saw an association of it as primarily something that was happening abroad and was carried out by individuals from one country and another country. So in the very early first examples of what was considered terrorism, it was largely seen as interstate rather than interstate. So, you know, you wouldn't categorize in the earliest numbers about what constitutes terrorism. You wouldn't see somebody from within their own country who was waging what we now consider to be a terrorist act. It wasn't considered terrorism at the time. It didn't meet that definition. That definition changed over time. And by the 90s, you saw something radically different. And in 1995, when Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, the country started to look at what might be happening at home in the United States. There had already been two years earlier an attack on the World Trade Center, which did not kill as many people, but the Oklahoma City bombing had people thinking about what they had been looking at abroad and whether it could happen at home and what to do about it. And so there were two laws passed in 1996 that really set the stage for this. The first was known as the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, passed in 96 that created a secret court to be used in immigration deportation cases, in immigration cases when individuals were accused of terrorism. So even though the Oklahoma City bombing had nothing to do with immigrants, this was a response that manifested in terms of not just the death penalty and regulations regarding that, but also created a secret court that wasn't even being used at the time. That same year, another act followed called the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which allowed immigrants who were not even found to have done any wrongdoing when it came to their immigration cases to be deported with secret evidence against them on allegations of terrorism. So those individuals who were brought forward in these deportation hearings were never told of what evidence had been made against them, who it had been made by. Their lawyers were never told. They had no way to defend themselves. The judge was the only person to whom that information was revealed. And when you looked at the dozens of people who were deported through that particular kind of, you know, what became known as the secret evidence laws in the mid-90s, a majority of almost every single case known to the public was either somebody who was Muslim or Arab. And so it had a devastating impact in Muslim communities in the United States. Many Muslim children growing up in the 90s, the first understanding of politics and of who Democrats and who Republicans were, was based on these laws. And when George W. Bush ran for president in 2000, he vowed not to use secret evidence in these immigration cases. It was wildly popular in many immigrant communities. He won the Muslim vote in 2000 by 80%. And this was incredibly important. It wasn't widely reported on at the time. It wasn't even a very large number of individuals affected by it, but the legislation and infrastructure that came in place had devastating impacts on these communities, did not result in the prosecution of any individual terrorist, resulted in no thwarting of plots that ever came to public knowledge or has ever been admitted by the government. And George W. Bush won the Muslim vote in 2000. That obviously changed in 2004 quite dramatically. But it gives you a window into one of the original reactions to an act of terrorism that wasn't perpetrated by an immigrant, but which manifested in something that at least rhetoric-wise was popular among the public or was seen as a means to pre-empt particular kinds of violence committed by particular kinds of people. Obviously, after 9-11, you had a spate of new programs. One of them was not a piece of legislation. It was a rule introduced by the INS. Immigration and naturalization. Yeah, what was then the Immigration and Naturalization Service to start a special registration program. And so this is called NCIRS. It's the National Security Entry Exit Registration System. And it basically took individuals from 25 Muslim-majority countries, 24 Muslim-majority countries, and North Korea, and made them go through a very specific kind of registration when they were coming to the United States. For many people, these rules wound up becoming redundant. There were far more effective ways to have special vetting procedures for individuals who were coming into the U.S. from these 24 Muslim-majority countries in North Korea. And yet it was very politically popular at the time. This rule that was introduced by the INS, when you look at the number of comments that were given to the federal that were given to the INS when they first proposed this rule, in 2002, there were 14 comments. This wound up affecting 90,000 people, and only 14 people submitted comments about this proposed legislation that resulted in deportation proceedings for thousands of Muslim men in the United States, and men coming from countries that were Muslim-majority. So this is another example of among this case, of these cases of tens of thousands of men. So I think it was over 90,000 in total were affected by the NCR system, and 13,000 were deported, or had deportation proceedings through this program. Not a single instance was there a case in which anyone was prosecuted for terrorism, or a case of an allegation of terrorism that turned out to be true and in a public record. There is no single example of that. By 2011, the Obama administration concluded that this program was redundant, and no longer necessarily served what many believe it to be associated with at the time, which was something that was politically popular, something that the INS had done as a means to react in the wake of 9-11 to individuals coming from certain countries, and they wound up halting the program. Most recently, before Obama left office, he shut it down completely. So these are two examples, pre-9-11, and there are two examples around 9-11, and then many more that happened afterwards. There is an incredible vetting procedure for individuals from Muslim-majority countries right now. There is a special program called the Controlled Application Review and Resolution Program, or CARP, in which people from Muslim-majority countries have their immigration cases delayed or stalled for lengths of time that can be up to a decade, before they are eventually denied. And the only thing, the recurring thing that advocates and lawyers and others who have been involved in these proceedings have found, and this was started in 2008, is that everybody on this list, either a majority of them come from Muslim-majority countries. Specifically, it affected most Pakistan, Iraq, India, Iran, and Yemen. And yet, once again, there have been no cases attributed to CARP, in which you can show a prosecution of terrorism or an allegation of terrorism that came to public light as something that was a credible threat. You have the no-fly list, which is a part of that, and then you have a VISA waiver program introduced under the Obama administration in 2015, which essentially affected, it took the countries in which the United States affords, there are some 39 countries to which the United States allows individuals from those countries to come to the U.S. without a visa and said that if they had visited several Muslim-majority countries, including Iraq, Syria, Iran, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, and Libya, if anyone from those VISA waiver countries had visited these areas after 9-11, they were not automatically granted a VISA waiver. So there is precedent for this. This precedent has- To be clear, that was a change to the VISA waiver program rather than the VISA waiver program, which existed for many years. It was an amendment to the VISA waiver program. It was the VISA waiver program Improvement and Terrorist Travel Prevention Act in 2015. And so what you see in all of these cases is they're related very closely to public rhetoric. In all of these cases, you can't find a case in which there was a prosecution of terrorism or the capture or detention of an individual who it turned out had been convicted or found to be in public light. As somebody who was a terrorist. And you have a number of these programs. And even when Trump talks about the current travel ban, he refers to this 2015 Obama VISA waiver addition, this improvement plan, as justification. And it's because there is a history. And yet, with each of these cases, it can be attributed to public conversations about immigrants, about terrorism at the time, and the effectiveness has been in question in each of them. Thank you, Asma. So I want to come back to this question of vetting after David speaks of the broader context in which I think what we're talking about is a willful conflation of attempting to ascertain people's political beliefs and ideological allegiances with their intention to commit a particular crime or having actually committed a crime. And that goes back to looking at are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party and immigrants coming from Eastern Europe and from the Soviet bloc further back. And so these, and I think what you see is an attempt to really link this, did you once have coffee with somebody who the US government might think is a bad person with willfully vague characterization versus are you actually, is there something that you've done or will do? And I think there's data that bears this out, which I think David will talk to us about right now, about who has committed terrorist attacks in the US and why it's a sort of reasonable extrapolation to think that past performance in this case is indicative that the patterns that we've seen over the last several decades are likely to be predictive of who might commit terrorist attacks in the future. So, David. Thank you. So we just heard about sort of the history that led up to the current policy. I'm going to talk briefly about... So I'm going to talk briefly about the current policy and its effectiveness. If you're here, you probably know what we're talking about, but just to set the reference points January 27th is the first executive order covering seven countries. They probably sound familiar from the visa waiver program changes before. Also a ban on Syrian refugees. This ran into legal troubles. So we get travel ban version two on March 6th, which drops Iraq from the list and also drops the explicit ban on Syrian refugees, although they're still covered by a secondary halt and cap. Which applies to all refugees. So the first thing I want to talk about is I'm going to focus on its effectiveness, but the travel ban is neither moral nor wise, nor is it effective. It has numerous costs that we have here, ranging from disruption to U.S.-Iraqi relations at the time when we were just getting started with the Mosul operation in a serious way to really fueling this war on Islam narrative that may help radicalize people within the U.S. and actually make the terrorist threat work to a disruptive rollout of the program that both disrupted the way our airports function for a while, as well as just being evidence of what seems to have been a failed policymaking process to produce us. The impact on individuals themselves who are affected by it. So that's the core of some of the legal challenges. And then finally we have sort of the foundational question of its erosion of the individualized suspicion. Now it's possible that legally the ban will be narrowed sufficiently to people who those protections do not explicitly protect, non-citizens. However, that still cause for concern that we're narrowing our understandings. But what about its effect on us? Well the initial justification that was laid out was well we had 9-11 in which 19 foreign hijackers entered the U.S. and killed thousands of people in a matter of hours. And then the executive order also lays out that numerous foreign-born individuals have engaged in terrorist activities since that attack. So let's take these one at a time. First the 9-11 attack. Certainly it was the failure of border security to not pick up that there were 19 hijackers who entered the U.S. However there's two important points there. The first is that the travel ban was none of the countries that those hijackers came from. So it actually would not have prevented the 9-11 attacks. And the more important point is that we reformed our immigration system, our funding, as well as engaged in a variety of efforts against the terrorist threat, both abroad, military operations across the world as well as at home, as well as just building a variety of databases that we now check immigrants against and people asking for visas. So really even the executive orders language acknowledges that the system we had before 9-11, which really failed, is no longer in existence. It however claims that we are still seeing foreign-born attacks and foreign-born terrorist activity inside the U.S. So in fact the ban would not have prevented a single death inside the U.S. since 9-11 nor as we saw would have prevented 9-11. At New America we looked at four or two cases of terrorist activity of any kind motivated by jihadism in the U.S. We found 13 people who committed an act of deadly violence inspired by jihadist ideology in the U.S. Every one of them was a citizen or legal resident hence not covered by the travel ban. About half of them, actually more than half, were born inside the U.S. Some, like Carlos Floresos' families can, in African-American convert, can trace his background and his family's military service back to at least the Civil War. And of those two came from abroad or were born abroad, none of them actually came from the travel ban countries. And some of them came as children as jihadist and Arab did. Others committed their attacks on the U.S. state or so after they entered the U.S., like Hessian had died. So it's really unclear how the travel ban would have affected any of us. Faced with the simple fact the administration and its supporters have pointed to the larger world of terrorist activity. If they can't find a deadly attack inside the U.S. what about funding or non-lethal attacks? Well, we looked at those 402 cases each one since 9-11 where 84% were citizens or illegal residents, not covered by the travel ban. That's at the time of charging. 72% were citizens. And about half, or at least half, at least 48% it's probably higher, we have some we couldn't figure out. We're actually born American citizens. We also looked at the non-lethal attacks. Once again, about half were born in the U.S. and the remainder don't really track well with travel ban countries. You can see that there are three cases where the individuals were born in the travel ban countries. I'm going to talk about each of those now. None of them really provides a strong support for the ban. So first, we have Muhammad Tehariah Zar who in 2006 drives a car in two fellow students at the University of North Carolina sort of a precursor to some of the deadlier attacks we've seen lately. Now, he was born in Iran and came to the U.S. So to put a sort of frame on your sense, we have one case of an individual from Iran committing a non-lethal attack in the U.S. and more than 300,000 Iranians came to the U.S. in just a period of, I believe, 2006 to 2015. Not even the entire period we looked at let alone people who came before 9-11 and conducted attacks. In addition, he was a naturalized citizen which gives you a sense of how long he had been here. He lived in the U.S. at the age of two and almost two decades prior to his attack. Actually more than two decades prior to his attack. So really, his entire radicalization occurred inside the U.S. It was homegrown and really had nothing to do with his origin in Iran. The travel ban really would not have prevented this except by aspect of chance. It could have just as well been someone else. I have to hear a Don who recently was engaged in his stabbing in Minnesota, born in Somalia. Once again, we see there's a large number of people to frame this, about 70,000 according to Pew. Once again, like to Harry Azar, he's a naturalized citizen. Like to Harry Azar, came as a toddler to the U.S. And once again, he committed to attack about two decades after he entered the U.S. So this also doesn't seem to really support the travel ban. Now we have the case that most closely supports the travel ban, Abdul Razak Ali Artan. He came to the U.S. as a refugee in 2014, was born in Somalia, which would seem to support the travel ban's claim. However, when we dig deeper into this case, we see a couple of things. First, he left Somalia for Pakistan as a child and then entered the U.S. from Pakistan. If we look at that, which he did as a teen, if we look at that, if he radicalized abroad, which we really do not know if that's the case, it most likely occurred in Pakistan when he was of a greater age and not in Somalia. Pakistan is not covered by the travel ban. Perhaps more importantly, he was radicalized according to his Facebook post, claiming to attack, in part by listening to Anwar Alaki's sermons and arguments, which Alaki was born in the U.S. He's a natural born citizen. He spent the large part of his adult life inside the U.S. or at least traveling back and forth, taught in the U.S. and his ideas, which draw explicitly upon American history, have radicalized a wide range of Americans, including natural born American citizens like some of those we've talked about before, like Carlos Bledset. It's far from clear what exactly was unique about his origin in Somalia, if anything, that explains his care of activity. So the Department of Homeland Security actually somewhat agrees with these key points. As we can see here, they did an assessment based on the travel ban. They found similar to us that about 50% were actually U.S. citizens or born U.S. citizens that they say that country of citizenship is unlikely to be a reliable indicator of terrorist activity. They also found that the foreign born individuals came from 26 countries. They're not centered in the travel ban countries. And indeed, for three of the travel ban countries, Iran, Sudan, and Yemen, had one individual among those. And Syria, where the original travel ban banned any refugees from coming, had zero cases. Another Department of Homeland Security assessment on this looked deeper into some of the points we saw in those individual cases that I pulled out. Among the most foreign-based U.S. violent extremists, likely radicalized several years after entering the U.S., nearly half of the foreign born violent extremists were less than 16 years old when they came. So, again, their radicalization was homegrown. The majority of foreign-born individuals who came to the U.S. came more than 10 years prior to their indictment or death, similar to Tehariah Zahra and Dahir Adam. And then we have nearly all of the parents who came with minor children did not espouse radical ideology. So it's not that the parents should have been screened out and they brought their children and just radicalized it in a community here. It's the radicalization process that is occurring broadly in the U.S. and isn't really about their national origin. So you might say, what do we care? Any entry is at least a threat that can be prevented. Well, we have a quick comparison here. Dylan Roof killed nine people at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina. He's from, born in Columbia, South Carolina, population about 131,000, similar to some of the travel ban countries. So would we prevent Dylan Roof, or would we prevent individuals born in Columbia, South Carolina from traveling throughout the U.S.? No, that would be absurd. Yet, for some reason, we take exactly these same cases and currently the Department of Homeland Security frequently asks questions and administrations, and those people have tended to take cases that read a lot like this and put it forward as a reason to ban hundreds of thousands of people from traveling to the U.S. So let's talk quickly about the administration's numbers. You might remember when President Trump addressed a joint session of Congress. He said that the majority of individuals according to a Department of Justice study who had engaged in terrorist activity in the U.S. were born, you may have also heard in Numbers 72 that's that same list, but the people only from that original travel ban list then recently DHS said they have 300 FBI investigations of people who entered as refugees. Let's talk about the list first. First of all, this list is problematic. In 2003, the DOJ actually said they did not want to release this list because it was prejudicial. The reason it included people who were not actually engaged in terrorist activity. Many of these people on the list are simply investigations that began as terrorist activity, but were later dismissed that there was no linkage. It also does not include international cases on it. It's also not a Department of Justice list. They did not code it for national origin. That's something that then Senator Sessions did. We should at least get the sourcing of that, correct? And finally, even at face value, only a small percentage of the individuals on that list came from the travel ban country. So let's talk about the 72 individuals that Stephen Miller referenced on Meet the Press when initially justifying the travel ban. Well, we looked at that list. We found four individuals on it who had actually never entered the United States. They were either captured abroad or extradited here at the base trial. At least 20% had no tied to terrorism, even by the government's acknowledgement. Going back to this really isn't a list that should be used to understand the terrorist threat. There were only three attack plots. Two were monitored by informants. Both of them entered during the 1990s before we were focused on terrorism. So if there was an identifiable threat, we'd probably catch it now, but we weren't looking for that kind of thing then. And one entered as a child again. The other wasn't a jihadist case. That's the odd Iranian who was involved in a plot to kill the Saudi ambassador. There's questions there. We don't really know what's up with that plot. If that's going to be used to shut down travel from a number of countries, it really needs greater explanation. And finally, 19 were Iraqis, and the travel ban no longer applies to them. So 300 refugee investigations. First, an investigation is not a case. Most of these are closed. As you can see, there's somewhere between a thousand and 10,000 investigations a year at least. Many more if you're counting even lesser types of investigations. The following up on tips, et cetera. And we found only 402 cases that have actually been charged since 9-11. In addition, about 3 million refugees entered the... There are about 3 million people that entered as refugees in the U.S. and more than 100,000 from the six travel ban countries alone. And when asked by the Washington Post, the U.S. Refugees Commission's program said that they've only got about a dozen who were arrested or kicked out due to terrorist threats that were present at the time they entered the country. Less than a fraction of 1%. So let's talk about one of the cases that has been put out by DHS who justifies the 2010 Portland, Oregon case in which Mohamed Osman Mohamed, born in Somalia, plotted to attack a Christmas tree festivity in Portland, Oregon. Indeed, he was born in 1991 in Somalia. However, like many of the cases we've seen before, he entered as a kid. Actually, his family entered in 1993. He was two or thereabouts. They came prior to 9-11 when we massively beefed up our security infrastructure. And decades before, he actually was indicted in this case. His radicalization occurred here, not abroad. He became a naturalized citizen, like others we looked at. He was caught in a sting operation, which though not dismissive of this, and this may well have been a real case, raises questions about how reliant we should be on it, especially in regards to any particular details of how that plot played out. In addition, it just shows that there are other investigative measures that are already protecting the U.S. We don't need to prevent it at the area where kids at the age of two entered the U.S. That's what we have been formants and tips and the FBI for. And finally, his father, who did enter the U.S. as an adult from Somalia, provided a tip to the FBI regarding him. So, just to close out, this isn't just an issue of data. In fact, I would argue that the administration's claims makes two fundamental errors about the jihadist threat today, which is both a concern for why exactly are they approaching it this way, but also are they effectively analyzing the real threat. First, the Internet knows no visa. Really, the radicalization today is occurring on the Internet. We found 44% of these cases either were posting jihadist material online in their social media, or having encrypted communications. That's actually somewhat misleading, because at the beginning of the decade, it was very few people, and now it's almost everyone. In fact, assistant attorney general for national security, they court, so it's that she can't remember a case that they have going currently where there's not an online radicalization type. So, let's take a quick look at the anatomy of an ISIS attack in the U.S. This is the Garland attack. Who did it involve? ISIS-born citizens, Nadir Sufi and Elton Simpson, born in the U.S. They had support according to charging and court documents from a third U.S. citizen, also born in the U.S., and then they were in online communication with Wajid Miski, who was a legal permanent resident from Somalia, but who had left the United States years ago to fight with Al-Shabaab, never intended to return and was in communication over the Internet with them, and a Brit who was operating from Raqqa, Syria. The travel ban would not have prevented any of this. This is what the greatest likely threat from ISIS really looks like in the U.S., or at least the most organized today. The second main threat is that political violence has a long history in the U.S. It's simply wrong for us to assume that when an individual is from abroad, that's what defines their terrorist activity. For example, we've been tracking deadly attacks by a variety of ideologies in the U.S. Well, Jihadists have killed 95 people in the U.S., far-right extremists have killed, I think, it's 51 now. In fact, for a number of years, they had killed more people than Jihadists. We also now have a range of sort of violence that is quasi-political, but not really. For example, an armed man showing up at Kamit Ping Kong after reading sort of some fake news reports. We have our mass shooting problems. This is from Mother Jones. Find sort of a death toll from mass shootings and other attacks, only those inspired or referencing Columbine, not dissimilar from those we have seen from Jihadist attacks. So that's all I have, but I just want to leave you with a return to we've seen why it's not really effective or it doesn't address the problem, but it also would appear to make the problem worse and imposes a variety of costs, simply instituting an ineffective policy to assuage our fears or to fall through on a campaign promise. It's not a no-risk proposition. Thanks. Thank you, David. Yeah, as most people in the room probably know, the travel ban in its two implementations has really only been in effect for very short periods of time after the courts stayed the initial version of the travel ban. The Trump administration went back and revised it, and then a federal judge in Hawaii suspended that ban pending a hearing on May 15th, so still, you know, over a month away in a federal appeals court in the Ninth District. Nevertheless, there have been effects of the ban, and Osma will speak very briefly about those effects, and then we'll open it up to a discussion and with that, we'll start learning more as well. So David was able to get into some of the effects that have happened abroad in most of the majority countries that see this reinforced as a war on Islam, but I want to briefly talk about just intelligence communities, law enforcement communities, DHS, and other parts of the government and what individuals within these organizations and agencies are saying or reflecting on some of these proposed measures. And the sort of, the assessment I've heard most is why are they doing this? They are making our job harder. And in case after case, I hear from individuals who say that this kind of attention only undermines their work. This kind of focus on framing this around Muslims, not even just the countries they're coming from, but the way in which this has been called a Muslim ban, even before it was introduced, has really isolated communities that many of these individuals believe that they should have good relationships with. Can we say individuals that, to be clear, you mean current American military, law enforcement, and intelligence personnel? The individuals that I've been interviewing? Yes, yes. Just to be clear who we're talking about. Yes, current and former. And so even when I talk to police officers, it's really fascinating to see their frustrations when it came to funding. They saw their funding after 9-11 cut for what they were ordinarily doing and tons of money was going to cops on the so-called terrorism beat. People who were manning fusion centers. People who were involved in some of the aspects that now we call the militarization of police and getting some of these large-scale weapons and things that traditionally cops don't use whereas budgets were cut elsewhere. And they're reduced to ticketing in higher numbers. And so it has these effects that we never even associate, the sort of emphasis on putting money for counter-terrorism into arenas that it's not necessarily needed for. That type of threat is not assessed to be. And when you step back and you look at harms in society, many of them often say, look, I'm actually very annoyed with the CT part of my job at the FBI or whomever it is that you're talking to. Counter-terrorism. Yes, the counter-terrorism part of it. I wish we could have more money on X. We could look at more of Y to actually keep the public safe, to protect our security. And we can get even deeper into examples like domestic violence and other issues that affect with far more loss of life every year than terrorism does. And we don't talk about it. We don't frame it as a threat and we don't necessarily put policies and priorities towards it in the same way. And so this is what I've been hearing and it's certainly worth opening up for a conversation. I want to start us out, David, by just forcing you to enunciate your critique with a little bit more clarity because there's part of your presentation where it's a little bit of like throwing one's hands in the air at how little sense any of this makes where these are the wrong countries. And looking at the September 11th hijackers who were Saudi and Egyptian, two Emiratis, I believe. And I just want to make it crystal clear that I don't think certainly and not in my view, and I don't think in yours either, a travel ban, it's not that they chose the wrong countries and if you've made a blanket ban on Saudis and Iraqis then this would somehow be sensible. And I just want to have you talk a little about this question of targeting and by national origin versus individuals. Right. So to be clear, I think there are sort of two problems, one of which is even if you were to plan to do policy this way, the list of countries doesn't seem to align with any plots. But the real issue is that it's not focusing on specific threats and the reason why you can't actually adopt a policy that just picks the right countries in quotes is that those countries aren't stable. In fact, if we look back at those non-lethal attacks, some of them route through places like Britain. Should we have shut down travel from Britain after Richard Reid? Or we have sort of Umar Farooq Al-Mutallib who trains in Yemen but is born in Nigeria. That's sort of a problem that is central both in organizations decide to get around restrictions like these by choosing who they recruit and who they rely on but also just the same fundamental error of ignoring the way that the internet doesn't respect visa requirements isn't just an issue for the US. It's an issue that has really globalized the organization of child hysterism. So it's not just training in one particular country that you could even focus on even if you got beyond all of the problems with abandoning selective specific intelligence threats which can overwhelm the process and create a variety of other problems. It's really just everywhere now. Thousands of foreign fighters from Europe who went, are we going to stop immigration or travel from Europeans because of that threat? And I think the point you're trying to make here it's not unique to the internet, right? It's the flow of ideas in general, this predated if you look at ideologies going back. To go back to the 9-11 attacks one of the reasons why it was this particular nation was they were selecting for who could get into the US. It's that the organization selects to get into the US. The organization's pattern of who comes into the US are broadened and that can't really be put down to what's the 6 countries or 14 countries or 28 countries. But I think the point about this list of countries and we'll mention this isn't a unique bit of public policy from the Trump administration, the border wall is similarly the point you're trying to make is that this isn't a serious attempt even to do something with a lack of care towards the rights of individuals in much the same way, regardless of your attitudes about documented or undocumented immigration for people that were not accusing of committing terrorism at all, building a giant wall along all 2,000 miles of the border is an ineffective way to do that. So that same critique you're writing. To go back to one of the issues or costs of the rollout was that it didn't reflect the agency process that was working, it didn't seem to have come up from DHS. In fact, we saw that DHS's own assessments when they were called upon to research, they said, no, this isn't actually the problem we face. Now, you can read that as partly just well, this policy doesn't make sense but it's also an issue of how we approach the terrorist threat and bringing in sort of a top level political goal of fulfilling a campaign promise regardless of whether it is actually based in the facts. Tom Ricks, for example, has written about how some of the actions at DHS more broadly in immigration, the push for aggressive responses regardless of actual facts or policy reminds him of the push up to Abu Ghraib which was both a great atrocity but also really damaged US security interests and also, to me, this sort of intelligence process leading up to the travel ban reminds me of the lead up to the war in Iraq that there's a preset intelligence goal driven politically and it's not really based from what the agencies themselves are warning that's not true, that's not the threat we face and it's ignored by the political set to push what they desire from the beginning of the administration from campaign promises or so on. So I want to open the discussion to the room and then Asma, I'll have you interject as well. Please do wait for the mic because we're broadcasting this live streaming and do say your name and affiliation if you have one. A question for Asma. John Mueller from Cato and the Ohio State University if I got it right you said you talked to FBI people who talk about the hazard is really not that bad and a lot more things kill a lot more people and so forth is that correct? Not bad, but where they'd like to see their policies and priorities going. So for example, one thing that I've heard from many individuals is that, you know... In the FBI you're talking about? Yeah, I'm also talking about the FBI but it includes essentially how the travel ban effect faces abroad and the ability to have US presence in many of these areas. It affects the ability for you to actually spend money or focus your efforts on particular cases of individuals who you've honed in on who are possible credible threats versus this blanket problem in which you may essentially be creating some of the very people that you're trying to keep from existing in the first place. They do not say we're spending too much money to catch six people a year essentially. Not in those terms at all. No, that's not what I was saying. Hi, thanks. My name is Rafael. I'm actually just a graduate student on break. I don't study this in this field but this is just an interesting topic. And so I have a couple of questions. One, as you pointed out, a lot of this really is about ideas being spread through the internet. So my first question was, A, are you seeing a movement by the Trump administration to increase some of his surveillance? And I'm not aware of what privacy reasons can and cannot be done, but are you seeing an increase in that also? And my other question is, just having spoken with folks who support this, I've heard the argument that, oh, well, a country like, say, Iran, yes, they have lots of students coming and contributing to the US, but they don't have a very good vetting process and we really need to make sure because of that vetting process, that's really the reason for this. So I'm just curious how you guys would respond to that particular argument. So with respect to the vetting process, let's take the first one first just in order. So internet, not in surveillance on the internet and then we'll come back to that. And the Trump administration? So we don't have a full scope or sense of what surveillance is taking place. Obviously we've seen the proposed or rumors or speculation about increased types of surveillance or monitoring, including, you know, people are talking about a reality of, would you have to give up your password at the airport? And that's one that's something that you can know about your password to social media, for example, when you're entering through the border. Will there be new rules or requirements for people who are forced to do that on a more consistent basis? There are questions of things like that, but how that materializes, I certainly don't have a full sense of yet. Well, and I would just step back from, you know, crossing a border and being asked for, you know, your Twitter password is potentially problematic, but also in a certain way not the biggest problem in this arena that's facing us. But it's the type of thing we know about right now. But what we know about... Yeah, so more broadly, look, the only reason one can say definitively, much of it all, about the mass surveillance apparatus of the United States government is because of the leaks of the documents that Edward Snowden released, right? And a handful of other whistleblowers earlier. Thomas Drake, a small number of others. To my knowledge, and you know, a lot of the Snowden documents were dated even at the time that he released them. You know, they were from four years ago, six years ago. I think we're seeing in a moment where the intelligence community and the Trump administration are at loggerheads in a variety of different ways. And I haven't seen any discussion of, you know, since January 20th when Donald Trump took office, has that mass surveillance changed? I mean, I think part of... And this was part of Asma's point, I think, going back to Clinton era and laws that, you know, there was a Republican Congress at the time, but Bill Clinton signed these laws to do with secret evidence. Part of this dysfunction is to do with Donald Trump and the unique nature of his presidency so far. Part of it is to do with the nature of the American state as it's evolved over the last half century. And I think what's... It's sort of analytically useful to try and disaggregate these two, although that's a difficult thing to do. And that brings us to your question about vetting. And I want to turn to Asma and David on this, but it's a really strange, like, thing to set out to do, right? You go through this... Probably the closest domestic analog is security clearances. I don't know how many people in the room through this process, either themselves or for friends or acquaintances.   I do have predicted that Edward Snowden would do what Edward Snowden did, you know, three months beforehand. No, is the simple answer to that. And I think that the sort of bureaucratic craziness of the process behind... I mean, because the security clearance process domestically is trying to assess the same question. Is this person trustworthy in the eyes of the state? And that's what you're asking about sort of potential immigrant or visitor to the U.S. But how many people of Iranian origin or how many people from Iran on student visas have you spoken with? What's the ratio who's getting my student visa was very easy? In the conversations that I've had with individuals, even on student visas, it has been such an arduous process. I know so many individuals from most of the majority countries who have been accepted into university can't go because they weren't able to get a visa. Who were, you know, they had something planned here, whether it's a program, a writer's residency. Things like that were constantly, talking to people who intended to come to the United States for something and were unable to get a visa. From every account, it is an incredibly difficult process. And just to highlight one particular kind of example, and I know Iran is not Iraq, but there have been thousands of Iraqis who served as translators to the U.S. military in Iraq who were promised through laws that were passed in the United States the ability to come to the U.S. to immigrate here. We have talked to so many translators who are rejected routinely despite having had commendations to their name, despite having connected them with the exact unit in the United States, the exact military unit that they served with, whom they translated for, given letters of recommendation and still get the box checked when they're told no that says due to a security threat. And they don't know what allegation has been made against them. They don't know what allegation is if I remember correctly. There's a great This American Life episode on this recently. It happened in the last few months that talks to many of these translators. I just got back from a trip from Iraq where this man I was working with was begging me. He said, look, I've applied through every which program I had been promised a spot and nobody can figure out why I'm being told no. And so from my understanding it's a guaranteed spot to immigrate and have what appear to be flawless records. Which goes to David's point of this set of policies being both morally indefensible for people that the United States owes a debt of honor for having served the country, the rights or wrongs of the war in Iraq independently, and just tactically moronic. Again, this is a moment when Xi Jinping and Donald Trump in Florida, I think, as we speak and if you're an Iranian and it's easier to go to China than it is to the U.S. There's this question of sort of American self-power and the profound effect that over years of these policies is having on the United States standing in the world. I think it's impossible to understate how big that is. I'm just at good's points. For example, with Syrian refugees two years, it checks against all of these databases, none of which we had prior to 9-11. It includes cultural training during which it's continued to check against these processes. Sorry, cultural training you said? Yep. Can you elaborate on what that comprises? Like, intro to the U.S. 101 that you have to go through during that time if you're like... So where are you when you're taking that and who is teaching that? Outside the U.S., I believe during which time we're still checking. So the extreme betting is already here. There's actually a number of questions about are we betting too much already? Are we betting on things that aren't actually related to picking up security threats? And in some cases, there may be a legitimate discussion over are there things that should be changed to that process? Should we look more at sort of visits to particular countries in certain ways? But we're already in an area where we need to be debating what we already have in terms of is that actually effective? And whether or not the betting process needs to be improved has no bearing on just a straight shutdown which really reveals that whatever policies have been put forward aren't just about tweaking the betting process to be more effective. There's clearly other motivations there fulfilling the campaign promise getting as close to the idea of the Muslim ban as they can justify legally. And that's not really addressed by defaulting the argument back to the intricacies of DHS's bureaucratic process for betting in various entrants to the U.S. Hi. Thank you. My name is Duncan Grimm. I'm just here because I'm interested. But I'm wondering, so you began on a note of talking about political rhetoric and political rhetoric driving intelligence decisions or driving policy. And I'm curious as to what you think and can't predict the future but for those who think Donald Trump is doing his best to protect the country and being prevented by institutions. When the next attack happens will that political rhetoric he has arguably the largest bully pulpit drive action again and he can pass the success of that attack off on whoever has stood in his way. And what's that look like for an administration that moves faster policy-wise than the Congress can or the courts? I'm not a political scientist so I don't want to put out too much sort of that. I think it's a complex factor but that's certainly a worry. One thing I would note is that we've already seen an attack in England since we've been discussing this travel ban the one in London lately. And even though that individual was a convert born in England, an English citizen, was engaged in sort of violent activity before he radicalized Islam to sort of a jihadist view of Islam before he even converted to Islam. Yet we've seen the Trump administration officials defending the travel ban put forward and latch on to this London attack as well we don't want that to occur here thus we need a travel ban. It makes no sense so in the aftermath of an attack when everyone's emotions are running for very good reason, terrorism is frightening, it's meant to be frightening, it's built that way. We should both be thinking on well did the fact pattern of that attack actually have anything to do with the policies proposed and also even if the attack did fit the fact pattern, even if we did have an attack by a refugee or an immigrant from one of these countries did we really need to engage in a travel ban or did we really prevent that or did we see intelligence failure of another kind or a policy failure and really do even go back to the 9-11 attacks after the 9-11 attacks when 19 foreign hijackers who infiltrated the US on visas killed thousands of people in the matter of hours our response was not no one from these countries can travel to the US that great we knew that the response wasn't that and one of the reasons we knew that was we knew that there was an intelligence and policy failure that was better, we knew there were two al-Qaeda operatives inside the US at that moment the correct answer for how to prevent attacks like that or the better approach is to make sure that information sharing is worth to address specific threats not to take the sledgehammer to the sort of trade patterns and immigration that really keep much of the world order functioning in those historical examples I was giving many of them were enacted right after a major incident or attack and so that is what you'll likely see the distinction maybe that perhaps and I'm not going to speculate but this travel ban was issued as an executive order right perhaps this could be legislation in the future after a terrorist attack or something to which the president has been warning about something like that could change political will you could see members of congress taking this up you could see a department even the department of homeland security or some of the organizations in which you've already seen their critiques about this current travel ban introduce a rule or propose new legislation it really just it could manifest the change I would see is maybe moving from an executive order to something with more popular popular support I want to come back David briefly to not give the George W. Bush administration too much credit for a rational response I mean looking at September 11 the vast majority of the perpetrators of that attack were citizens of Saudi Arabia and the Bush administration had a very strange relationship with Saudi Arabia going back many decades and that some counterfactual where they had been from a country that would be easier to pick on for reasons external to terrorism we might have seen a different response then I also just part of the premise of your question that Trump because of his ability to move quickly has outpaced the courts so far at least that hasn't been true in this instance right the courts have reacted swiftly they have reacted decisively they've reacted to preserve their view of the American constitution and I think the constitutional objections raised in the court system would apply to legislation just as they've applied to executive actions for the most part and again I'm not a lawyer well I mean if they do what they did during NCRS which was a rule this is that national security entry and exit legislation they did 24 Muslim majority countries and North Korea that's what protected it legally you had a non-Muslim majority country in the mix and you may even say Eritrea as well necessarily Muslim majority has a large Muslim population that's how they did it legally and they would probably take similarly effective measures so it's entirely possible to do it either of those ways they won't face the same legal constraints obviously speculation is difficult I mean it is this quote of Donald Trump is worth returning to again and again where he said I could shoot somebody in the middle of Times Square and they'd still vote for me and that's clearly true of some subset of the American electorate also and coming back to one of David's points I mean there's a bit of an analytical sort of deliberate analytical narrowing here that this thinking of this travel ban in terms of terrorism as we have been leads to the results I mean you really can't have a brain and dispute the numbers that David relayed to us but it's also about identity as is the wall as is the broader rhetoric around immigration and that's somewhere where you can read any number of works of journalism of good journalists that go out and spend time in West Virginia in the American heartland there's a lot of well-meaning xenophones in this country and they're not bad people but they are afraid of people who are not like them and how do you convince people like that that this is bad policy I don't know if you guys have any ideas I mean my focus is much more on just the fact pattern of what it says not on pushing sort of the political argument I do think that one thing we should pay attention though to them is we shouldn't just talk about the perpetrators of the attacks and discussing whether or not they fit the pattern there are also immense costs to those and putting a face on those costs isn't we need to do it we don't need to do it for sort of the political point we need to do it for just understanding and having proper policy analysts right so there's plenty of people every time there's an attack whether or not it occurs by a refugee or an immigrant are happy to push that out and point to that and repeat the name repeat the fact pattern of it perhaps not even the fact pattern of it we don't really hear about the 7000 doctors like one by one who the travel ban would not allow into the US the people whose wives or husbands can't enter the US because of the travel ban or the foreign students who either can't enter the US or are now afraid because we have an unpredictable immigration system that seems like they could be banned by executive order just whenever the president decides that or people who are afraid of getting stuck in the airport based on an executive order like many did when it was first put out and we did see some reporting on that but often the way it's reported focuses much more on the tax there are reasons for that they're not entirely like inappropriate reasons we should just do a better job of personalizing and explaining the actual cost when we're weighing these we're weighing it properly and I think one of the areas is really even though the numbers clearly say there's not much time so no sense to the travel ban the emotional punch of some of this where you see the actual pictures or so on or hear the personal story that needs to be done sir and then up front here and then in the back my name is Mohammed Qassim I've lived here since 1962 came as a student and then got married and stayed on but anyway I've been watching this very carefully and I'm very sensitive to immigration officers having worked in 55 countries I know what the buggers do besides work for the bank I was also a foreign service officer so I traveled to the US can you hear me now I have Parkinson's disease my voice is all very good but anyway I've been watching this for some time now and I'm quite convinced that these things are going to get worse from what Asma is saying that happened where you have various legislation passed under the Bush and Obama and under this lot is very bad what really upset me was the way how nasty the American immigration officers have become at the airports before they were the best behavior of the lot rarity of rarity rarity of rarity and I look at Trump and he doesn't admit to be wrong He said he saw these several thousands of Muslims cheering 9-11 attack.  But also there's Sessions, there's Bannon, there's Miller, there's Kelly. They're all the same now, and they are now the majority of this country. They represent the Republican Party. Not a single Republican has said he checks to this travel bag. Not a single one. Wish he washed it from McCain, but the rest of it, they keep quiet about it, and they'll go along. And I just see it just getting worse. There's no rational approach to this at all. It's two months after Bush got in, Bill Clinton in his first speech said, what drives American politics? Hate, hate! He knows what he's talking about. Thank you for that intervention. Depressing, yes. Yeah, I mean, I think there are many reasons to be very pessimistic about America in this moment. There's also one can look to history and see that things got worse and then got better. So there's also reasons for sort of hope in the long term, including the judicial system. There are many countries in which you get somebody, I mean, look at what's going to happen in Turkey next week, when very likely a referendum will pass giving Erdogan explicitly even greater power than he already exerts in that country. There are many countries in which if somebody like Donald Trump were to win an election, the capacity of the judiciary to mitigate the harm of his actions would be much more limited than it has been in the US. And I'm not sanguine about what's happened in this country in the last few months. But it's not nothing, either. And we're going to see both over this particular issue of the travel ban and more broadly the role that the courts play in this sort of checks and balances that were taught about in civics classes from elementary school onwards in this country. It's a case study in how well they actually function in the world. We had a question in the back and we'll come back. Hello, my question is, is there any way that we could deal with crime in general, including what you're talking about today, terrorist activity potentialists, that does not involve eventually being able to read someone's mind? And it sounds like I'm being facetious, but I was reading the other day that scientists are working on techniques where they can actually probe people's minds to determine whether they have violent tendencies or what their background is or what they have designed to do. Because terrorists, quote, unquote, can look just like regular people, right? So nobody wants to sit next to a terrorist. No one wants to go into a plane and sit next to a guy who's got a shoe bomb. But we all want to treat everyone fairly. So can you imagine any way of administering justice without being able to read people's minds? I think there's a couple things on this. I think we are with the jihadist terrorist threat in the U.S., reaching the point where the type of attack we're seeing are often less organized. Many of them are sort of the classic lone wolf inspired, not much of a connection. Or at least something along that. We're seeing also that in other areas. So I think we do need to start thinking about is a sort of counter-terrorism apparatus which is really built to smash organizations and prevent the sort of sophisticated attacks we saw, for example, on 9-11, an appropriate response to what we're saying. And I think there are real questions about that. On the other hand, I think we should also acknowledge that in many of these cases, it's not a matter sort of peering into people's souls. The FBI did a study that about 80% of these cases, these terrorism cases, I believe, do have leakage, that they are telling someone they're going to conduct an attack or that there's sort of preparation activity that can be seen. And that's something seen in other sort of mass shootings and really any kind of violence that has a more sort of prepared aspect to it is probably going to produce some of this. So I mean, I don't know if that answers. Hopefully I think we're somewhere between where the level of the threat is at a point where we have to start beginning to think about is a counter-terrorism apparatus an effective response to this given the level of activity while also recognizing that many of these cases. I guess just as an example, going back to Garland, there were many signals there that that was in fact, there was an informant who was actually behind the car of the shooters when they started shooting. So this isn't only needing to see into people's minds to be able to actually prevent the attacks we're seeing today. It also raises, I mean, you raised a great point when you asked this because there are, for example, new proposed models of policing. It's called predictive policing. It analyzes, I think one of the first sort of tests of this was in Chicago, if I remember correctly, and people are analyzing demographic factors to predict crime and for many people who research crime, they're troubled by this because demographic factors may not provide effective solutions in terms of which neighborhoods you decide to police in more. In fact, it masks some of the real issues that they associate with the root causes of crime that are linked to issues of whatever else it might be that these serious researchers of the study. And so I would say this, as a reporter, it's not my job to opine on these sorts of things, but when you look at the data and you talk to people who are involved with, for example, predictive policing or who are studying those kinds of models, root causes are often forgotten. And questions, for example, even with instances of terrorism, you're just dealing with the after effects, not necessarily with, well, a majority of people who say that they want to commit a terrorist act said they did it because of X, Y or Z. And thinking about structures and models that step away to see that bigger picture, I don't see a lot of that kind of study, frankly. It's a broad question and a good one. And you were sort of focused on this sort of motive aspect, which is necessary but not sufficient component for crime's opportunity. And it's news to nobody in the room that gun violence in the U.S. is dramatically different than gun violence in other Western democracies. That's, I mean, in terms of not trying to read people's minds, just being like, we're not going to try and read everybody's mind. Like, let's not all have guns. You know, that's another whole political can of worms for, again, many reasons that are nothing to do with gun violence, per se, but get to questions about identity and community, you know, as Barack Obama, you know, famously mentioned in a moment where he didn't think anybody was listening. So, I mean, there's one is the question of gun. The other is this, you know, the sort of predictive policing type programs that Asma mentioned. I hesitate to talk about them with a broad brush because there's a lot of different, as with any sort of new set of technologies, there's a lot of hokum out there, and there's some actual good work and thoughtful work about, you know, how to sort of think about the structure of gangs, which exist in urban America, and how do you try and think when at risk youth, you know, may be sort of falling into criminal behavior through a social network in a way that's sort of broadly similar to the sort of process of radicalization. And there's some programs that address that sort of question quite thoughtfully, and there are others that aren't. You're talking about do you send a crop out to an area where you see, when you're analyzing, it's like, who are these programs for? To what extent can you go to an area and make this the subject of law enforcement? Some of these models may provide interesting questions and answers for study and for research, but when it's a question of law enforcement action, that to me is a very distinctive, and that's why when it comes to policing in particular, it raises really interesting questions about where you focus your effort. I don't think anti-crime should be seen narrowly through the lens of law enforcement, right? I mean there's lots of... Right, but predictive policing, that is essentially, that is about law enforcement and police. Right. So it's not a broad brush in that sense. We'll keep fighting after. If I can make one comment before my question. If we go back 30 years to the point you were just discussing, I mean the soundbite narrative of, you know, mass violence that we had was going postal and high-power rifles and bell towers. You know, both of which referring to the University of Texas shootings and then several disgruntled postal workers, but the response to that was not predictive policing, was not an overreaction to that. My question is this. If you go back 18 months on the refugee crisis, and let me start by just saying your research is just so exceptional and so helpful. So thank you. But 18 months ago that young boy washed up on the shores of Turkey and there was not this fear-based response. It was, you know, how can we, you know, and there was almost a consensus, you know, do more, welcome more people here. There wasn't necessarily a conflict about that. And then Paris happened and we kind of got into the minds. And also quite cynically I think some politicians decided that it was politically advantageous to paint a group with a broad brush and it did become politically advantageous and we've seen that. If we look at this administration, part of the, I think, acknowledgement that many people have is that there are in fact some thoughtful people in the administration. Secretary of Defense Mattis, HR McMaster, John Kelly, you know, some others. If we were to take a logical response after these travel bans have come out, what would you recommend that their rhetoric at their speech is to say, this is, because we care a great deal about keeping America safe, and that would, you know, be part of the rhetoric, but it makes it, it makes, we should do it by design, it should be logical, it should be in consonance with our values. What would you recommend that they say on what a proper security policy is, which very likely is a speech that they will have to give after the next attack that occurs in whatever form that is? So, I mean, I think there's two scenarios, right? Like, we don't know after the Federal Appeals Court hearing on May 15th, you know, I don't know what that court is going to rule and then what happens after that ruling. So, I mean, I think one of your questions is what should the Secretary of Defense say to the world in an instance where the travel ban is actual policy that is enacted, and then there's another scenario in which this travel ban never comes to pass because the court stopped it, and I don't know which of those scenarios is it going to happen. I want to let David and Asma interject. Just briefly, your historical narrative, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that the U.S. was ever doing right by Syrian refugees. I think there's, you know, a version where we were doing well and then the Paris attacks happened and we, like, stopped admitting people. I think this is somewhere where we've been just indefensibly falling down morally from day one. The U.S. had some of the lowest numbers. I think in 2014 it was, they had accepted 2,000. I would have to go back and check. It was a very, very low number. Yeah, it was such a low number and nobody could, it was the end of 2014 I think it had risen to 2,000 and it was just a fraction of other countries. So, I mean, that's been the case. I think the difference is that, you know, now they're actively being, it's not even like you can raise that number very much, it's actively not allowing anybody. So, it was always a tough, a tough sell. I obviously do not have a broad solution at least based on any of the status for the Syrian conflict or refugee problem, let alone the threat of terrorism more broadly. However, I do think that perhaps the easiest or most sort of primary answer to that is a lot of the policy should actually go through the agency and departmental processes we have. It's not like this research that I presented here is something that DHS does not have. In fact, when the administration reached out to the Department of Homeland Security and asked them to produce the data on this, they came back with, well, the policy proposed doesn't actually provide security. In fact, that's not a predictive method of who's going to commit terror. They did it at the multiple levels. They backed up everything we saw in particular examples. They committed attacks decades after they entered. They entered as children. It was radicalized here. It's not centered in the travel ban countries. It's not centered really in any countries. So, I think the sort of my primary advice would be instead of deriving the policy from the political goals of a campaign and political goals that are really morally terrible, a proposal of a Muslim ban that's then been tried to sort of move further and further into legality from what clearly is not legal. Start with the actual problem we face, the terrorist threat, ask the people we've tasked with doing that, which isn't to say that there's in lots of room for criticism of the professional counterterrorism community, but that would be a good place to start our debates on what actually prevents terrorism. I've also been looking at the legacy of these programs and these laws on communities in the U.S., and certainly you'll see interesting changes in years to come when it comes to a proposed wall of immigrant communities in the United States. But when it comes to a lot of these programs, the historical ones I talked about, they've had long-lasting impacts. And it's something I intend to further study. I can't speculate the way forward or the roadward, but I can say that these things have ramifications that we're not hearing about in communities, among, in this case, Muslim populations that could have enduring impacts we don't even know the extent of today. I think we're pretty much at time. If you have a brief intervention, please. How do you, Super America, save? Stop inverting Iraq and smashing it. This is the worst case of state terrorism in history. I mean, I think we largely address that. I mean, look, I think, and we can, if you guys want to weigh in, but closing on this note, you can come back to the cliches about the Battle of Britain and the sort of keep strong and carry on. Individual tragedies will happen, car accidents, people getting sick. Every one of us in this room is going to die, as is every American. That's not changing, and I'm not making any, this is news to nobody. So this, you know, do you set some goal of keeping America perfectly safe from enemies abroad? It's an unrealistic goal. The question is, not how you keep America safe, but... Well, I want to go back to what, we're talking about a very specific kind of threat that's classified a certain way, that this definition of terrorism emerged, and it means something very specific. And if you sort of peel back what it means to be safe or what it means to have security, there are many ways of categorizing that, that go beyond a narrow definition of terrorism that we use when we talk about our national security. We're talking about terrorism, when we reference the word national security. In the past, that wasn't necessarily the case. So you asked a very big question, it's very difficult to, it involves so much, that I feel like it would be too long, a long conversation. And I think we will leave it there. Before thank you all for coming, I did want to sort of ask everyone to give David a round of applause, because he's really the person who's organized this and really done a tremendous amount of work on this subject generally. And all of you, thank you very much for coming and joining us. And Dawes Ma, as well. Thank you.