Today marks 24 years since September 11, 2001 changed life in America. It doesn’t matter where you lived at the time it happened: the news you ingest, the security routines you have to endure in order to travel, and perhaps your own personal safety measures have all been altered since that day. David Schanzer is a Professor of Public Policy with Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy and joined WWL’s Tommy Tucker to discuss just how much has changed in the more than two decades since the terror attacks in New York City.
Schanzer is also the Director of the Triangle Center On Terrorism and Homeland Security. He noted that, while foreign threats are less of a concern due to increased surveillance and policing, domestic threats are a growing concern. “The data certainly shows that the threat is shifting. Of course, we had the terrible incident in New Orleans. It shows that there’s still some sort of affinity for violent Islamism out there but it’s much less prevalent and cogent in our society,” Schanzer pointed out. “These debates over leftist ideology in America and also conservative ideology in America now are the things animating our society now and tragically leading to acts of violence against innocent people of all political stripes,” he went on to add.
While the amount of data collection has obviously increased along with tech advances in the years since 2001, Schanzer says it’s always a bit of a game of cat & mouse when it comes to preventing terrorism. “In some ways it’s been the golden age of intelligence in the over twenty years since the attacks. That’s just because there’s so much information agencies can possibly get. However, there are also more solid encryption techniques and other methods that make it easier for terrorists to conceal. So, it’s an ongoing technological battle going on,” Schanzer noted. That said, he does concede that drastic moves like The Patriot Act have allowed law enforcement to make huge leaps in the decades since the terror attacks in New York City.