CNN "The Situation Room" - Transcript: Terrorist Recruitment

Interview

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MICHAEL STEINBACH, FBI ASSISTANT DIRECTOR OF COUNTERTERRORISM: We're past going dark. In certain instances, we are dark.

SCIUTTO (voice-over): That is the warning from the man leading the FBI's efforts to stop ISIS-inspired attacks here in the U.S., the new threat, encrypted communications offered more and more by Internet and phone providers to customers eager to protect their privacy, including potential terrorists.

REP. MICHAEL MCCAUL (R), TEXAS: Do we have any idea how many communications are taking place in the dark space? STEINBACH: No, we don't. And that's the problem. The ability to

know what they're saying in these encrypted communication situations is troubling.

SCIUTTO: U.S. officials say contact on the Web alone can be enough to recruit, train, and activate terrorists on the homeland, the gunmen killed in Garland, Texas, last month and the man shot by law enforcement in Boston Tuesday all believed to have been radicalized by ISIS, all highlighting the threat.

JOHN MULLIGAN, DEPUTY DIRECTOR, NATIONAL COUNTERTERRORISM CENTER: What they're telling them is, here is some easily available, readily available information online that you can exploit. In other words, they believe that they can provide them everything that they will need to undertake some kind of lone act or attack.

SCIUTTO: ISIS' tremendous social media prowess gives the group an unprecedented digital force multiplier, 2,000 core ISIS supporters pushing the message out, approximately 50,000 people retweeting the message, and more than 200,000 then receiving and reading.

MCCAUL: How many of those followers are actually in the United States, in your estimate?

STEINBACH: There's hundreds, maybe thousands. It's a challenge to get a full understanding of just how many of those passive followers are taking action.

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SCIUTTO: Hundreds, maybe thousands here in the U.S., and the challenge for law enforcement is distinguishing between lukewarm supporters and potential terrorists.

And the FBI's counterterror chief saying today it is taking no chances, as in this Boston shooting -- the moment, he said, when they saw any hints of mobilization, that's when they moved in. The trouble is, you don't always see those hints before something happens. And, of course, you have to distinguish then between the folks who aren't real threats and the ones who are.

BLITZER: And they're now saying this plot was imminent, could have happened today, yesterday, the next day. It was about to go forward.

SCIUTTO: They said June 2 or June 3, so -- well, yesterday or today.

BLITZER: Yes.

SCIUTTO: And they had to move in when they did, yesterday.

BLITZER: All right, Jim Sciutto reporting, thank you.

Joining us now is the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Congressman Mike McCaul.

Mr. Chairman, thanks very much for joining us. First, do you know who this so-called prominent person in New York who

was apparently being targeted by this group in Boston for beheading, do you have a name? You don't have to necessarily share the name, but is there a name that law enforcement knows about?

MCCAUL: Yes. I'm not at liberty to mention the name, but it's top law enforcement.

And this is very consistent with what ISIS has been doing recently, their calls to arms of followers in the United States, when they Twitter these messages, as your reporters talked about, from Syria into the United States to attack both military installations and law enforcement.

This is the new wave, the new generation of terrorism. It's gone viral. It's very dangerous and it's very hard to stop.

BLITZER: The only thing we're hearing is this prominent person who was supposedly going to be beheaded, if they had their way, was not in the military, not in law enforcement, but a civilian.

Can you give us a little bit more detail, without necessarily revealing the name of this person?

MCCAUL: You know, actually, I can't. It's part of this ongoing investigation at this time, Wolf.

BLITZER: All right. Let's...

MCCAUL: But, yes, if that's all right.

BLITZER: But this was a serious plot, I assume?

MCCAUL: It's a serious plot.

Mr. Rahim has been under surveillance, both physical and technical, for a while. Law enforcement usually, as I knew as a federal prosecutor, gathers information, intelligence, and when they see something more imminent getting ready to occur, that's when they step in and stop it. And that's what happened in this case.

They entered into the scene to interview the subject, and he pulled a knife out and he was shot and killed.

BLITZER: That military-style knife -- and we're showing a picture of it -- similar at least to what Jihadi John in Syria, the ISIS killer over there, was using to behead hostages, including Americans. No coincidence that those two knives looked alike. Is that right?

MCCAUL: No coincidence at all, well-designed, well-thought-out.

All this has been transmitted online from several top ISIS recruiters out of Syria that send their Twitter messages out. You know, we heard from the FBI assistant director today, Homeland Security officials about what a big threat this does pose, because there are thousands of followers of these top ISIS leaders in Syria online that they talk to every day in the United States. And all they have to do is activate one of these sleeper cells to pull off something like this.

[18:10:20]

We saw Garland not that long ago, and now we just saw Boston yesterday. This is, unfortunately, Wolf, going to be a trend I think you're going to see more and more of.

BLITZER: He was apparently, and I'm quoting now from court documents, part of what they called an ad hoc terror network.

It was planning to randomly kill police officers in Massachusetts, then go ahead and behead this prominent person in New York. Do we know specifically how he was inspired or motivated or actually even instructed by ISIS?

MCCAUL: It's an online conspiracy. I mean, I was a prosecutor.

There's a conspiracy going on online every day between these top U.K. individuals within ISIS leadership out of Syria. There's a top one out of Somalia sending Twitter messages into thousands -- you know, there are 200,000 ISIS tweets per day going into the United States. That gives you a little bit of a sense of the volume and the traffic going on. And it's very difficult for our law enforcement to monitor and track that in real time.

I commend the FBI and Homeland on the job they did to stop this one. But it's the ever-evolving threat. And, as you mentioned earlier in your broadcast, the idea that they can jump out of what would be the public domain, where we can monitor, into other spaces that they call dark space, that, even if we have a warrant, and have a court-ordered warrant, we cannot monitor that communication or that activity, because it's gone into what they call secure com into dark space.

That is something I'm -- as -- I think members of Congress and certainly the FBI and Homeland officials are very, very concerned about.

BLITZER: When you talk about dark space or dark communications, they have new ability to encrypt their messages on social media, right?

MCCAUL: They encrypt them, but they also go into platforms that we have no access to. And I think that's part of that -- they say, go into the message box, and if we have coverage, we can pick that up.

But then they go into these other platforms that we -- even if we had, say, a wiretap or FISA wire on them, we could not pick that communication up. So they are communicating securely in a dark space with thousands of Americans per day, sending out directives, calls to arms to hit military installations, to behead police officers, hit government officials.

It's one thing for someone to travel over to Syria and Iraq and come back. But, boy, it's a lot easier if they activate someone who's already here.

BLITZER: You say thousands of Americans out there may be -- but we heard Michael Steinbach, the FBI counterterrorism chief, say hundreds, maybe thousands.

Give us a little bit more detail on this, that there may be thousands of Americans out there part of this kind of ISIS-inspired conspiracy?

MCCAUL: Well, the foreign fighters who have left the United States are in the hundreds. Those who have come back are at a classified level much lower than that. But what Mr. Steinbach, I think, was talking about are the followers of the ISIS recruiters online, the ISIS recruiters sending out over Twitter accounts, tweeting messages every day to activate followers that they have on their accounts.

And those are -- I have seen them myself -- in the thousands of Americans who are not only followers, but following, if you know a lot about Twitter. The people that are following are the people that are actually having active conversations and communications with online.

When they jump out of that space into the dark space, we don't have the ability, law enforcement doesn't have the ability to track that communication. And I think that's something that lawmakers need to be taking a look at to try to fix, so we can better protect Americans.

BLITZER: Mr. Chairman, I want you to stand by, if you can. We have a lot more to discuss, including this plot in Boston, one suspect dead, another arrested. Were more individuals involved? How broad of a plot was this?

Much more with the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, Mike McCaul, when we come back.

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BLITZER: We're back with the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Congressman Mike McCaul.

Congressman, the breaking news, as you know, prosecutors say that ad hoc terror network in Boston was plotting to randomly kill police officers, behead someone else, supposedly a prominent person in New York.

You saw what happened in Boston, and the assistant director for FBI counterterrorism, Michael Steinbach, he testified before your committee. He says upwards of 200,000 individuals are receiving, as you describe, extremist messages online sent out by these ISIS terror propagandists.

So what's the current strategy to destroy this kind of propaganda that's targeting the United States?

[18:20:05]

MCCAUL: That's a great question.

I mean, and you're right. There are about, on average, 200,000 ISIS- related tweets per day going out into the United States. And there are thousands of followers receiving these messages, directives, calls to arm to take up arms against our military, our law enforcement and government personnel.

I think the FBI and Homeland has done a -- so far a phenomenal job stopping this from happening by monitoring some of these communications. And that's either through public domain space or through other means of surveillance through a court order, which they did in this case, this particular case, the Boston case.

The question, again, I think arises when the communications go beyond that public domain, beyond what we can see with a court order, and into this sort of what we call dark space, secure com space, that has, I think, the FBI, Homeland, and people like myself most concerned because they can communicate freely about plots, terrorist plots against Americans in the United States without our having any ability to pick up those communications.

BLITZER: We know that Boston plot, one of the suspects, Usaama Rahim, he was shot by local law enforcement and the FBI yesterday. David Wright, another suspect, he was arraigned today. He's captured. They're now looking for a third individual.

But how big, how broad is this plot? Are more individuals out there part of this terror conspiracy?

MCCAUL: Well, right now, we think it's really the three. And Mr. Wright obviously was tampering, obstructing justice by destroying cell phone records, laptop information.

And they erased a lot of the laptop information, as I understand it. I hope we can retrieve some of that information, because that would be very valuable. They were under surveillance, as I mentioned before, both physical and technical. Law enforcement usually waits and gets as much intelligence as they can, until they see a more immediate threat and then, at that time, move in to stop whatever that threat may be. And, in this case, they did it very successfully.

BLITZER: Is he talking, David Wright, this suspect, to law enforcement and the FBI?

MCCAUL: I don't know the answer to that at this point in time. I do know that we have gathered a lot of the electronic communication and they're trying to retrieve that information as we speak.

But I know some of these guys are pretty savvy. The thing is, Wolf, you know, al Qaeda, bin Laden, it was caves and couriers. Now we're dealing with a younger generation of terrorists that are very, very savvy with computer skills, very savvy over the Internet and very savvy with social media of the likes that we have never seen before.

So, this is a whole new threat that law enforcement and the FBI and Homeland has not really had to come to terms with and is trying to do so in a very fast, evolving way.

BLITZER: Mike McCaul is the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee. Congressman, thanks very much for joining us.

MCCAUL: Thank you, Wolf.

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