At the heart of the strategy lies the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF). The first JTTF was created in 1980 to bring the FBI and the New York Police Department together in response to politically motivated robberies by radical groups. Since that time, the model has spread across the country. Currently, there are 200 FBI JTTFs around the country. By comparison, the FBI has 55 field offices. While the JTTFs are FBI entities, carrying out FBI investigations, their staff are drawn from other federal and local law enforcement agencies. According to the FBI, as of October 2024 the JTTFs consisted of “4,000 members—including FBI personnel and task force officers (or TFOs) from more than 500 state and local agencies and 50 federal agencies.” Deputizing local police to carry out FBI terrorism investigations dramatically increased the FBI’s manpower, making sprawling investigations such as a nationwide pursuit of a nebulous idea, possible. It also creates a pool of agents and officers ordered to go out and find terrorists, facing pressure to open investigations in line with the FBI’s political priorities.
Whether it be regular FBI agents or Task Force Officers, those carrying out the FBI counterterrorism mission are instructed to be proactive in finding terrorists before they strike. After the attacks on September 11, 2001, Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller retooled the FBI’s focus away from a law enforcement agency that prosecuted terrorists after they acted to an intelligence agency dedicated to preventing and disrupting terrorists before they can strike. To do this, Ashcroft and his successor Michael Mukasey dramatically rewrote the guidelines under which the FBI operated. These guidelines were originally put in place after revelations of the abuses of the J. Edgar Hoover years, when the FBI spied on antiwar and civil rights protesters. Ashcroft and others pushed a false narrative that such restrictions left the FBI helpless to prevent terrorism while regearing the Bureau toward the preventative approach.
The preventative approach to terrorism is rooted in the long history of FBI political spying. For many of the Hoover years, the FBI used a questionable interpretation of Presidential Directives to claim it had the right to investigate subversive activities. In the early 1970s, following Hoover’s death and growing criticism of the FBI, the Bureau concocted a new legal theory: The FBI’s intelligence gathering on political groups was justified by the need to prevent violations of a handful of federal statutes. Barry Goldwater and others then turned the same logic toward terrorism. Through a dissenting opinion on the Church Committee, white papers from right-wing think tanks, and a Reagan-era Senate subcommittee on terrorism, the narrative was crafted that restricting FBI investigations to those with actual suspicion of a crime meant the FBI could not prevent terrorism.