When I first entered the counterterrorism world in 1997 as an attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice, a sea change was underway in the field. Historically, terrorists were animated by the desire, in expert Brian Jenkins’ words, to have “a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead.” In the latter half of the 20th century, hijackings rarely resulted in mass casualties; there were targeted assassinations and horrific killings—the 1972 Munich Olympics come to mind—but, at least in the terrorists’ minds, they were carried out for a specific goal, such as Palestinian statehood. The most famous of these old-school terrorists was Carlos the Jackal, the Venezuelan-born killer who became the improbable face of Palestinian resistance and whose reign of terror captivated the world throughout the 1970s.
But by 2000, when I was serving on the National Commission on Terrorism, a bipartisan congressional panel tracking the looming threat of al Qaeda, we were warning of a different mindset, one that would come to rattle U.S. domestic security: Terrorists now wanted a lot of people dead and a lot of people watching. A new mastermind, Osama bin Laden, had replaced Carlos as the global icon of terrorism. The 9/11 attacks that he orchestrated the following year would go on to transform U.S. homeland security, domestic surveillance, and the nature of global terrorism beyond recognition.
