25 Years Later, the Frontline Has Moved Inside

The 9/11 Memorial Auditorium carries a weight that settles over the room before anyone speaks. A few hundred feet away is where it happened. So when a panel convened there to discuss how the nature of security threats has changed in the 25 years since the attacks, the location set the terms on its own. The conversation that followed was serious, grounded and at times quietly sobering.

The panel brought together three people who think about these questions for a living: Paul Abbate, former Deputy Director of the FBI; Rebecca Weiner, Deputy Commissioner of the NYPD's Intelligence and Counterterrorism Bureau; and Michael Jensen, Director of Research at the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University. What they described, across two hours of conversation, was a security environment that is more complex, more fragmented and in some ways harder to navigate than anything that existed on September 10, 2001.

The core idea was simple enough to state and unsettling enough to sit with. In 2001, many of the most urgent threats were physical. They were visible. They moved through recognizable structures. Today, the most consequential risks can begin on a keyboard, travel through an encrypted chat, and end in the physical world. The line between online and offline, as Weiner put it, has become "completely collapsed."

The Frontline Has Moved

When Weiner joined the NYPD nearly 20 years ago, she described a threat environment built around conventional terrorism, much of it coming from overseas, much of it operating through some form of command and control structure. Law enforcement built trip wires around travel patterns and known associations. That model held, more or less, until around 2010. Then it started to shift.

The shift, she argued, was driven by radicalization moving online. What followed over the next 15 years was a diversification of the threat that has made it simultaneously harder to detect and harder to categorize. She described a category called Nihilistic Violent Extremism, born out of influencer culture and online communities where people encourage each other toward self-harm and, in some cases, mass violence. A form of threat, she noted, that owes its existence entirely to the internet.

Abbate, who began his law enforcement career in New York in 1996, put the evolution in concrete terms. When he started, his squad shared a single computer. The adversaries have kept pace with every technological development since, and in some cases run ahead. Al Qaeda and ISIS were early in recognizing the potential of digital tools to reach across the globe and touch people they would never otherwise have made contact with. What those organizations pioneered has since spread and mutated into something far more decentralized.

Extremism as a Community Problem

Jensen's contribution to the conversation was perhaps the most important for a general audience to hear, because it reframes the problem in a way that makes it easier to understand.

Extremists, he argued, use the internet the same way everyone else does. They seek information. They explore interests. They look for community. The person who goes online to find a fix for a broken dishwasher and the person who goes online to figure out how to join a terrorist organization are using the same basic tools for the same basic reasons. The content differs. The underlying human drive does not.

Radicalization, on this view, is primarily a belonging problem. People drawn into extremist online communities are often looking for status, meaning and connection. The ideology can come later, or it can remain secondary to the social pull of the community itself. Jensen noted that gaming spaces have become a significant environment for this kind of radicalization, particularly around nihilistic violent extremism, precisely because they offer exactly what vulnerable young people are looking for: a community, a sense of competence and an audience.

The technology has changed around these dynamics, from the message boards of the early internet to the encrypted private channels of today, but the underlying human need has stayed constant. Understanding that is the beginning of being able to address it.

Platforms, Encryption and the Accountability Gap

The platform problem came up repeatedly and without easy resolution. Jensen walked through the history: when ISIS was using social media aggressively in 2014 and 2015 to mobilize fighters, the major tech companies formed the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, a rare act of cooperation among companies that generally resist working together. They made meaningful progress on the global jihadist threat. Content came down. Coordination improved.

The threat evolved anyway. Fringe platforms carved out a market by offering what mainstream platforms would remove: a space where the rules were looser and the moderation lighter. When content gets taken down on one platform, it migrates. Jensen described it as a game of whack-a-mole that has never fully resolved.

Encryption compounded the challenge. Encrypted private channels, including features on platforms that are widely considered mainstream, have moved the most dangerous conversations into spaces where neither law enforcement nor the platforms themselves have visibility. Weiner noted that much of the intelligence her bureau receives about credible threats comes from online leakage: people in group chats who see something alarming and report it. That leakage is the system working. The harder question is what happens in the spaces where there is no leakage at all.

Abbate identified two structural tensions that make legislative or regulatory fixes extremely difficult. The first is the profit motive: content moderation is expensive and tends to reduce engagement, running directly against the core incentive of platforms built on advertising revenue. The second is the tension between free expression and public safety, a conflict that does not resolve cleanly in any democratic society. He noted some cautious optimism around recent court cases in California and Nevada that may begin to hold platforms more accountable for harms occurring on their services.

What Actually Works

The panel returned consistently to the importance of moving upstream: intervening before someone has traveled far enough down a radicalization pathway that disruption becomes the only option.

Jensen described curriculum his organization has developed for students from kindergarten through fifth grade focused on digital literacy: understanding how online environments work, who the trusted voices are, and what manipulation techniques look like. He argued that this kind of education needs to continue throughout a person's life and that the United States lags behind many European countries in investing in prevention programs of this kind.

Weiner and Abbate both emphasized the see-something-say-something model, understood as a genuine pipeline for actionable intelligence rather than a public awareness slogan. Abbate noted that in the vast majority of cases where violence has been disrupted, someone close to the threat actor saw something concerning and said something. Friends, family and community members remain the most effective early warning system available.

The public-private partnership model, significantly strengthened since 9/11, was identified as one of the genuine success stories of the past 25 years. Weiner described NYPD Shield, a program with more than 20,000 members worldwide that has evolved into something closer to a genuine peer collaboration than a one-way information transfer. Private sector intelligence capabilities have become sophisticated enough to meaningfully inform law enforcement analysis, and that exchange now runs in both directions.

The City Lesson

Cities are shaped by roads, buildings and public spaces. They are also shaped by information systems. The panel made that argument implicitly across two hours of conversation, and it is worth stating plainly.

What Weiner described as the "everything, everywhere, all at once" threat environment is the daily operational reality of the institutions responsible for keeping New York safe. It involves policing physical space and digital space simultaneously, with the understanding that the two can no longer be meaningfully separated.

Genuine civic safety now depends on digitally literate communities: people who can distinguish information from manipulation, community from isolation, and concern from panic. It depends on trusted institutions that can translate complex threat environments into practical awareness. It depends on schools, families, local organizations and private sector partners who understand that they are part of the safety ecosystem whether or not they think of themselves that way.

A Note from MODA Vi

At MODA Vi, we spend a lot of time thinking about what makes a city work. Quality of life in a community is usually measured in the physical: clean streets, accessible transit, good schools, safe parks. But this panel reminded us that the definition of safety has expanded in ways that most civic frameworks have been slow to catch up with.

Feeling safe in a city today means feeling safe in physical spaces and digital ones. It means having the literacy to navigate online environments without being manipulated, radicalized or isolated by them. It means living in a community where institutions, families, schools and neighbors are all paying attention and know what to do when something feels wrong.

The panelists described a threat environment that is genuinely complex. They also described a response ecosystem that, when it functions well, is built on exactly the same things that make any community resilient: trust, communication, shared responsibility and the willingness to stay engaged rather than look away.

That is the civic work. It happens online now as much as it happens in person. We think that is worth understanding.