Our Counterterrorist Federalism
Based on a longer article I’d written on this topic, the Hoover Institution published today my essay “Policing Terrorism”, in its institutional journal, Defining Ideas. Here’s how it begins:
In recent months, the New York Police Department (NYPD) has come under attack for its counterterrorism intelligence activities, including its alleged efforts to “map” ethnic communities and its surveillance of religious groups.
Published by The Lawfare Institute
in Cooperation With
Based on a longer article I’d written on this topic, the Hoover Institution published today my essay “Policing Terrorism”, in its institutional journal, Defining Ideas. Here’s how it begins:
In recent months, the New York Police Department (NYPD) has come under attack for its counterterrorism intelligence activities, including its alleged efforts to “map” ethnic communities and its surveillance of religious groups. It is easy to view this controversy in familiar terms of security versus privacy or non-discrimination. Seen in those terms, the natural solutions seem to lie in tightening and enforcing substantive restrictions and guidelines that govern police intelligence activities and investigations. The natural and important focus on substantive restrictions on police surveillance and intelligence collection, however, should not obscure the broader structural and institutional issues at stake here: What role should local police agencies play in terrorism prevention, and how should their cooperation be organized horizontally (among local police agencies) and vertically (between the federal and local governments)? How much discretion should state and local governments have in performing counterterrorism intelligence functions? And how can counterterrorism tasks be integrated with other police functions?My essay offers some recommendations for addressing those questions. For readers interested in a more critical and less sanguine take on local police and counterterrorism activities, especially those directed at combating radicalization, I recommend this report by Faiza Patel at the Brennan Center for Justice.
Matthew Waxman is a law professor at Columbia Law School, where he chairs the National Security Law Program. He also previously co-chaired the Cybersecurity Center at Columbia University's Data Science Institute, and he is Adjunct Senior Fellow for Law and Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. He previously served in senior policy positions at the State Department, Defense Department, and National Security Council. After graduating from Yale Law School, he clerked for Judge Joel M. Flaum of the U.S. Court of Appeals and Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter.
