“While the public may have been surprised by what happened on Jan. 6, the makings of the insurrection had been spotted at every level, from one side of the country to the other. The red flags were everywhere.” 2/16
On Jan 2, Donell Harvin, head of intelligence at DC’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency (HSEMA), was freaking out enough that he called Mike Sena, his counterpart in San Francisco, who confirmed his office was also awash in warning chatter. 3/16
If you were plotting it from left to right, it would look something like this:
No Threat > Lone Wolves > Coordinated single attacks w/ 100s of casualties > Multi-pronged, simultaneous attack that can kill thousands (think 9/11) > Terrorists have nukes and/or biological weapons
Right now, the Taliban is somewhere between ‘Lone wolf’ and “Coordinated single attack” on the mock spectrum above.
One of the absolute fundamentals of counterterrorism is that you keep pressure on the terrorists to stop them from planning new attacks.
Most of you probably know by now, but the basic reproduction number, or R0, is how epidemiologist gauge the infectiousness of a particular virus.
It’s also looked at as the average number of people an infected person will infect. 1/X
You may remember early on in the pandemic, Covid-19 was estimated somewhere around an R3, meaning that every covid positive person was likely to infect around 3 more.
Not great, obviously. 2/X
You may also remember talking about how we had to “drive the R down” via methods like masks, social distancing, capacity limits, etc.
The goal is to get R under 1, meaning that every infected person would infect less than one additional person. That’s how you slow the spread 3/X
Let’s talk “unmasking” and the latest Fox News bullshit tornado, shall we?
It’s no secret that the US intelligence community routinely—and lawfully—collects the communications of foreign persons of interest.
So what happens when a US person is caught up in that collection? 1/X
There are strict minimization requirements in place to protect the identity of any United States citizen or permanent resident that is incidentally collected while monitoring a foreign national.
This shows up as “US Person 1,” etc. on intercepts. 2/X
If a senior official feels that the identity of one or more of the minimized US persons is necessary to understand the context of the communications, they can request that the originating (read: collecting) agency reveal (‘unmask’) their identity. 3/X