Nineteen Islamist terrorists murdered 2,979 people on September 11, 2001. The government’s counterterrorism (CT) response to 9/11, which was the deadliest terrorist attack in world history, included domestic security measures like the TSA, the PATRIOT Act, surveillance, and numerous wars overseas that we lost. The costs of 9/11 were horrific, and the response was gargantuan. When studying public policy, we must ask: Was the counterterrorism response to 9/11 worth it? Did it save enough lives to pay for itself or at least break even?

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September 11 marks one of the darkest days in US history. Terrorists murdered thousands of people on American soil, put countless people in fear for their safety, and left a scar in American history that can still be felt to this day. Yet what is less known is the financial surveillance that was expanded in the wake of the attack.

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The worst terrorist attack in world history occurred on September 11, 2001. Many security failures contributed to permitting the attacks to occur, including the inability of the legal immigration system to stop the 19 hijackers from receiving temporary nonimmigrant visas to travel to the United States. Fortunately, the system has improved, and vetting failures have become far less frequent after the attacks. 

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Reporting highlights

●  Evidence From Britain: A trove of evidence from Britain that became public only after the FBI closed its 9/11 investigation raises questions about a Saudi man who assisted two of the hijackers.

●  Suspicions: Material seized in 2001 from Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi student who had lived in San Diego, intensified suspicions about what he knew before the attacks.

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Friday marks 25 years since the September 11 terror attacks. Americans are spending the week remembering those who lost their lives and honoring the first responders and others who sprang into action to help. The attacks cast a long shadow, stretching beyond Ground Zero, the Pentagon, and Flight 93 to transform not just the United States but the world.

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It was 25 years ago today that the Western world completely changed following the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11th, 2001. The shock of these horrific terrorist attacks caused a seismic shift in security policy both in Washington and Canberra. While the initial shock justified a major response, the focus on non-state and counterterrorist threats soon consumed a generation of national security policy, military resources, intelligence efforts and intellectual attention.

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When ADL published its first report on 9/11 conspiracy theories in 2003, it noted that the internet allowed an “unprecedented cross-fertilization of antisemitic ideas” and that they contributed to a “new form of global antisemitism.” The report also noted that these conspiracy theories were likely to endure and “form the basis of a new antisemitic canard that will linger for decades and be used to demonize Jews and Israel.”

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The September 11 2001 terrorist attacks were unlike anything the world had seen before.

For America, and the watching world, September 11 (or 9/11) seemed most like a Pearl Harbour moment – a devastating surprise attack by a distant enemy that demanded a response.

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Hate crimes data recently released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) reveals that reported single-bias anti-Jewish hate crime incidents in 2025 remained by far the most common form of religion-based hate crimes in the United States. A total of 1,528 anti-Jewish hate crime incidents were reported in 2025, which amounts to nearly two-thirds (63 percent) of the 2,408 reported religion-based hate crimes nationwide. 

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Scientists have crossed an important line in biological engineering. In a recent study, researchers used artificial intelligence to design complete sets of genetic instructions for bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria. Some of those computer-generated designs produced working viruses when they were built and tested in the laboratory.

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When the first rockets began falling over southern Israel on the morning of October 7, 2023, staff at Assuta Ashdod Hospital activated a plan they had rehearsed for years. Within hours, the emergency department was treating waves of patients suffering from gunshot wounds, blast injuries and burns—all while the hospital itself remained under rocket fire.

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People who experience greater hardship throughout their lives may become more susceptible to conspiracy theories when those experiences lead them to see the world as fundamentally unfair, according to new research.

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Abstract: The most serious near-term threat posed by artificial intelligence to counterterrorism is what information and support AI models are willing to provide to terrorists, and that property is almost entirely unmeasured. This article reports the results of the pilot run of Tech Against Terrorism’s Counter-Terrorism AI Benchmark, which showed that almost one-third of responses from AI models provide meaningful uplift when prompted to assist malicious actors in the preparation of terrorist activity despite guardrails in place meant to prevent such responses.

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The US Africa Command (AFRICOM) on 16 May 2026 stated that in a joint campaign with Nigerian forces in north-eastern Nigeria, Abu-Bilal al-Minuki, head of ISIS global operations, along with other senior ISIS terrorists, were killed.[i] Leveraging US intelligence capabilities, the largely Nigeria-led ground forces benefitted from American advanced surveillance, intelligence analysis and joint planning. AFRICOM Commander Gen.

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Artificial intelligence may not create a new kind of terrorism, but it makes existing tactics cheaper, faster and easier. That is the central argument of a July 2026 report from the U.S.-based think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies.

It is a convincing argument, but it leaves one question unanswered: Are different terrorist groups thinking about the technology in the same way?

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On July 15, 2026, the Department of Justice took an extraordinary step by filing its first-ever application to activate the Alien Terrorist Removal Court (“ATRC”), a specialized Article III federal court that Congress established thirty years ago as an alternative to administrative removal proceedings for cases i

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Congress built the Alien Terrorist Removal Court as a constitutional pressure valve for the rare case in which the government says it must remove a noncitizen on national-security grounds without exposing classified evidence. The Trump administration has now turned that dormant tribunal into a live test of whether a secret-evidence removal system can survive first contact with politics, civil-liberties scrutiny, and the demands of public accountability.

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