This next guest comes recommended by our friend Mike Lyons, who we've been talking to for years about anything that happens military wise. He said, you got to get Josh Campbell on Josh Campbell's CNN Security correspondent, former FBI counter terrorism agent, Navy veteran. It says, here, friend of the Armstrong in Getty Show. For over fifteen years, you've been a listener, Josh, Welcome to the show. How you doing?
I have Jack, It's a pleasure to be on listening a long time. And if you indulgent me just a quick story. I actually learned about the A and G show. I was on a FBI team that was working overseas counterterrorism cases. And it was actually a Navy seal who said, hey, you guys have to listen to the show.
And I'm in La, so I'm already a Californian.
But one story in particular, we were out on counter terrorism mission and you know, you have your logistics. An important part of that is how do you feed your crew? And this defense contractor who's responsible for our food screwed up and they basically had an entire case of hot dogs as our food. And this just happened to coincide as we're sitting around the campfire listening to the travails
of positive Sean and his hot dog episode. So there were we were, you know, listening eating our twentieth hot dog of the week, thinking, man, we feel your pain.
Brother.
All right, that's what I paid our producer, Sean one thousand bucks if he could eat seventy hot dogs in a week, which you did, and I paid him a thousand dollars. So you're in LA. You're listening to us then on KABC in Los Angeles, which we are proud to be on. I was in LA the other night.
I was at LAX, and Lax had that feeling that the airports have sometimes when security is ramped up a bit, am I imagining that or not with the FBI say, and all lights are blinking for terrorism attack and all that sort of stuff.
No, you are, you know, since the attack by Hamas on Israel, I mean we've seen that then reverberate across the country. I was using across the world where you have intelligence services, security services around the world now on a high alert to include here in the United States. You know, the FBI director recently said that you know, anti Semitism. What the FBI is seeing is unlike anything uh that it seems certainly in the modern era.
Uh.
And so you know, they are prepared for any type of attack. I mean, we know that there are different types of terrorism. You have you know, cells and groups, but a particular concern to the FBI is the so called lone wolf and that's someone out there who you know, is online, who's on the receiving end of all of this, you know, vitriol and garbage and you know, all the anti anti Semitism that we're seeing, who might opt to
actually act with violence. And so that's something certainly that they're watching.
Yeah, the lone wolf thing, which I know is is a hard thing to stop for obvious reasons. And then you get a porous border also. Uh so you know a cell coming together doesn't seem like a big stretch.
No, you're right, I mean, that's I have to tell you.
I mean, that is one particular concern is you know, obviously when you talk about people coming into the United States who the government isn't able to keep tabs on, I mean, that is a lucrative mode of entry, so to speak. You know, if you're a terrorist group, wondering how you actually secrete people in the United States. That's obviously one vector. I mean, go to the place where you know, people aren't being screened, or if there is screening, it's you know, it's very cursory.
And so you know that that's something interesting.
Obviously when we talk about immigration, I mean I don't cover politics for CNN, but I cover security, and that is certainly a concern.
You know.
Obviously, they're the the immigration laws that have been debated, you know, for for years and years. But on the security side of the House, law enforcement, the FBI, state police, you know, along the border, they're certainly concerned that among you know, people coming to the United States, it could be people trying to cause ill intent and that's a great vector to try to get someone in the United States.
So you talked about chatter and the and the FBI Director Ray saying he hasn't seen all the lights flashing like this since nine eleven. What other than posts on Twitter and Facebook are you guys talking about when you say you know, all the lights are blinking.
Well, I'll give you an example.
I mean, we've seen, you know, threats to Jewish institutions here in the United States, both physical threats that have manifested in vandalism and destruction, but also the online threats. And just to give you an example, you know, I've been reporting throughout this week. Over this past weekend, from Saturday to Monday, there were over four hundred Jewish institutions
in the US that received bomb threats. And you can imagine, you know, I've been speaking with Jewish leaders who say, you know, they're going about their services, all of a sudden, they receive a message saying that there is a incendiary device in your institution that's going to go off. You can imagine just the widespread chaos and fear and panic that that would cause. And you know, you scale that to over four hundred institutions, that's certainly something that law
enforcement is taking seriously. We're told that there are over thirty FBI field offices in the US that are currently investigating those threats. And you know, interestingly, as the FBI conducted its investigation, they learned that this particular wave of threats, the four hundred, were actually coming from overseas. And you know,
I talked with the Anti Defamation League. They actually have their own threat watchers who are going onto the dark web trying to find you know, these groups that are that are talking about, you know, conducting these types of threats in order to try to get that information to law enforcement.
And they said that one of the.
Typical profiles that they're seeinger these groups are actually young gamers, you know, people who are in these online gaming communities who are you know, spewing hate and then you know, get together and try to get attention and then go, you know, do these types of digital threats in order to try to see you know, the fear you know that they that they'll cause, and you know, even more sinister.
I mean, a lot of these online services are streamed online and so you know, these perpetrators can actually watch in real time the chaos and fear, and so it's certainly something that's very serious. It's it's a challenge for law enforcement when you're talking about digital threats.
Obviously, the relative anonymity of the Internet makes that challenging.
That said, the FBI and local law enforcement has had successes in recent months, including right here in southern California and Orange County. Just last week, the FBI arrested a juvenile who was making threats to Jewish institutions, to African American churches, and they said that this juvenile was part of an online ring of people who are calling in threats, and so they have seen successes, but these cases certainly very difficult.
I've got a friend who's in your line of work to be vague and always talks about trying to figure out if somebody is a keyboard warrior or an actual threat. That's got to be the real difficult thing. I mean, cause it's really easy to shoot your mouth off as a gamer where your head set to your friends and sound like a tough guy, and try to figure out whether that person is, you know, just shooting their mouth off or danger. How the heck do you ever figure that out?
You know, it's difficult. I mean, in the security world, you're looking for two things. You're looking for capability and intent. You know, someone who has the actual capability to cause harm, if they don't have the intent to do so, they're obviously know less of a threat. Someone who has the intent to kill people but isn't capable of doing so, you know, that's obviously something that that could be mitigated.
But when you couple those together, someone who is dangerous and has the ability to go out and cause destruction or to hurt people. You know, that's something that's certainly law enforcement is constantly trying to look for and chafing when you talk about you know, words and you know speaking. I remember when I was in the FBI. I mean, that was a constant challenge. Where do you reach that threshold from someone who's just spouting off, you know, to
actually someone who's inciting inciting violence. And you know, I'm not a lawyer like Joe almost with the law school, but that was a constant challenge. You know what what is it that gets you over that threshold? And it's certainly, you know, very difficult.
Yeah, you know, it's funny. I got a lot of questions for you, but I don't want to ask them because I don't want you to answer them. I don't make people any any ideas or or know that you're onto them. One thing I think often when I'm at airports and I see the security is I feel like we're so focused on like airports are the only thing you can attack it. The only way you can possibly ever kill people is with a plane or at an airport.
When obviously, there are lots of options out there is security amped up in a lot of other arenas that we just don't see outside of flying.
Yeah, you know, there's the scene and the unseen. I mean that security posture that you see at an airport, for example. A lot of that is to serve as a deterrent. You know, when you roll up to lax and you see you know the airport police officers there who are doing their random checks. You know, they'll stop every tenth or twelfth car or whatever it is. You know,
a lot of that is just to serve as a deterrent. Hey, if you're intent on causing harm here, you may be the person that gets caught up, you know, in this net. But there are a lot of you know, systems out there, a lot of intelligence collection platforms that are used that tried to detect threats, and a lot of it, you know,
can be after the fact. I mean, I'll give you an example of you know, here, there was a serial killer, for example, here in Los Angeles in the last couple of weeks, and this person was stopped by the Beverly Hills Police Department because the department had installed license plate scanners and so they had this technology that was in place that wasn't a tent on signing any pot for their person, but it helped after the fact because you know, at one of the scenes of one of these killings,
they cops got a license plate, they entered it into the system. The moment that guy popped driving through Beverly Hills, they were able to go and capture him. But you know, that's after the fact, right after the person's already done certain crimes, and.
So we're up against a hard break. Josh and I want to have time to say thank you very much for coming on, and we would love to have you on a lot more during this next year. Glad to get to know you, and thanks for listening all these years. Josh Campbell's CNN security correspondent. You're going to hear a lot more from him in future episode.