Mr. Markus K. Binder, Program Lead for START’s Unconventional Weapons and Technology portfolio attended the CBRNE Convergence 2024 Conference in Orlando, Florida, from October 29 to 30, 2024. CBRNE Convergence is a major international conference series that brings together industry, first responders, policy makers, and academia to review and discuss developments in the fields of CBRN threats and response.
On the afternoon of October 30, Mr. Binder delivered one of the Conference’s two closing presentations, titled “Patterns of Interdiction for CBRN Events,” in which he discussed the various modes by which CBRN terror plots are discovered and subsequently interdicted by law enforcement and other State agencies engaged in counterterrorism.
Drawing on global data from the START Violent Non-State Actors (VNSA) CBRN Event Database covering 1990 to 2024, Mr. Binder sought to draw the attention of policymakers and practitioners to the importance of studying plots that did not result in attacks. Noting that the VNSA CBRN Event database actually records more failed or abandoned CBRN plots (308) than successful attacks (283), Mr. Binder emphasized that these unsuccessful CBRN efforts can still tell us a great deal about such topics as agent choice, agent acquisition paths, targeting choices, and importantly, failure points. Studying these failure points may assist government agencies in efforts to develop more effective measures to divert, detect, and defeat potential CBRN attackers.
Focusing particularly on the method by which CBRN plots were discovered, and subsequently interdicted, Mr. Binder drew attention to the high proportion of incidents revealed by chance encounters with law enforcement versus the relatively small numbers of plots revealed by informants, undercover agents, and sting operations. He further noted that the proportion of plots interdicted through surveillance operations, particularly through U.S. government electronic surveillance, is likely to be significantly understated due to the limitations of public reporting with many of the events recorded as “probable cause searches” likely to have been the result of surveillance tip offs. In concluding his presentation, Mr. Binder called on law enforcement officials to make themselves accessible to researchers seeking to deepen understanding of the mechanics of plot discovery and interdiction.
Earlier in the day Mr. Binder was an invited panelist for two roundtable discussions of a topic of particular interest to conference goers: Assassinations by State-Actors using CBR agents. The first panel focused on the use of chemicals such as those employed in the failed 2018 assassination attempt on Mr. Sergei Skripal, while the second addressed biological and radiological poisonings. Topics addressed across both panels included the history of CBR assassinations; the potential for novel agents to complicate detection, attribution, and response (to include clean up); the tensions between effective response and investigation of politically sensitive attacks with international intelligence connections; state motivations for this particular mode of assassination; and the relevance of criminal poisonings to developing effective response capabilities.
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For a deeper dive into this subject, Mr. Binder will publish an expanded article on his presentation in the December 2024 issue of CBRNe World magazine.