Thread by @jseldin

US still facing risk from terrorism, former National Counterterrorism Center [NCTC] acting Dir Russell Travers

"We still have a lot of work to do" he told @mvhaydencenter Wednesday night, citing "diverse and diffuse" threats from range of actors

#ISIS - "They were very much on their back foot to be sure a year and a half ago - not so much anymore" per former NCTC acting director Russell Travers "They have something like two dozen branches and networks around the globe"

"We see [al] #Shabaab killing Americans in East #Africa. They're attempting to utilize aircraft for plotting" per Travers "We see them working on command and control coordination"

Ability of terror groups to use/adapt technology for deep fakes to weapons of mass destruction - "things that we're going to have to consider here in the next 4 or 5 years" per Travers

"The threat is in some ways offsetting some of those tremendous gains that we've made, and we're going to be thinking about this very carefully particularly as we start to draw down forces overseas" Travers warned

"We need to be a little bit on the humble side" when thinking about counterterror, per Travers "We need to think, I believe, fairly holistically about the nature of this threat because it can evolve very quickly"

"By far the greatest concern is right-wing white supremacists" per former NCTC acting director Russ Travers "In point of fact, this is not really domestic terrorism. It's a bit of an int'l movement"

"They all reference one another. They they sort of take energy from one another"

Right-wing, white supremacist groups - "we see some traveling back and forth, training overseas, but I don't think we fully understand the nature of these connections yet" per former NCTC acting director Travers "We don't actually, I think, understand the number of incidents..."

Terrorists "tend to be early practitioners of using technology in lots of innovative ways. And almost always their ability to use technology outpaces our ability to develop the kind of legal and policy to deal interact with that technology" per Travers

Terrorists and WMD? "This is probably one of the greatest concerns that I've got in that there are a lot of directions on how to build this stuff floating around on the Web" per Travers "...it would not surprise me at all to see poison gases"

"There's less focus on #terrorism, there's certainly far less interest in it downtown" per former NCTC acting Dir Russell Travers to @mvhaydencenter

"We don't have the kinds of meetings that we had. We don't have the sort of expertise and high level sort of significant counterterrorism experts at though at the White House that we used to have" per Travers

"I have no personal insight into exactly why I was fired" per former acting NCTC Dir Russell Travers "I went into the meeting as the acting director and I was told I was no longer"