Terrorists have shifted their focus in recent years away from attacking airlines to attacking subway and rail systems, according to an analysis of terrorist attacks over a 30-year period from 1982 to 2011. The author of the new study notes that in a previous analysis, for the period 1968 to 10 September 2001, he concluded that air travel within the United States entailed a greater risk of a terrorist attack than “virtually any other activity.” Statistically significant evidence, however, points to a growing focus of terrorist attacks against ground mass transit.

The FBI is unlikely to release details of how, working with allies in the United Kingdom, it managed to accomplish the task of identifying “Jihadi John” with only video footage of the suspect’s hidden face and a voice with a British accent. Identifying Mohammed Emwazi, a Kuwaiti-born, British-educated man in his mid-20s, was likely done at the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division(CJIS), which houses the bureau’s Biometric Center of Excellence(BCE). At BCE, the FBI uses the $1.2 billion dollar Next Generation Identification(NGI) software to scan photos, aliases, physical traits, fingerprints, and voiceprints. The software is interoperable with the Pentagon’s Automated Biometric Identification System(ABIS) and DHS’s Automated Biometric Identification System(IDENT).

The French government has asked leading social media and tech firms, Google, Facebook, and Twitter to work directly with French law enforcement during investigations and to immediately remove terrorist propaganda when authorities alert them to it.The Islamic State (ISIS), along with other Islamist militant groups, are using social media to disseminate their violent messages, recruit new followers and fighters, and share videos of executed hostages. Roughly 20,000 foreign fighters, including 3,400 from Western nations, have joined ISIS and other extremist groups in Syria and Iraq.

Three New Yorkers were arrested yesterday on terrorism charges after they attempted to join Islamic State (ISIS) militants in Syria, federal authorities said. Two of the men are Uzbek citizens, and one is a Kazakh. The three men also had domestic terror plans, which included plots to kill FBI agents, plant a bomb at Coney Island, and kill President Obama — “if ordered by ISIS.” Documents filed in court provide a detailed account of the logistics involved in recruitment into ISIS, showing the young men grappling with how to evade law enforcement, sneak across borders, and communicate from afar with members of the Islamic State.

On Monday, a jury in Manhattan found the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) liable for their role in knowingly supporting six terror attacks in Israel between 2002 and 2004, in which Americans were killed and injured. The case was brought under the Antiterrorism Act of 1991, which allows American citizens who are victims of international terrorism to sue in U.S. courts and collect triple the amount of damages awarded by the courts. The judgment on Monday granted $655.5 million to the plaintiffs. Legal analysts, however, question whether victims and families of victims will actually get any money from the ruling.

The recent attacks in Paris and Copenhagen are the latest incarnations of a new type of terrorism. Decentralized and homegrown, it is hard to understand. In many cases, these young perpetrators have been drawn to extremist ideologies without personal histories of religious commitment, militancy, or even social activism. How do they — in a relatively short period of time — get to the point where they are willing to commit such violent acts? The context in which these perpetrators live and develop contributes to these outsized acts of violence in at least two significant ways. The first has to do with the nature of excluded communities. Cut off by many boundaries, these communities become like islands disconnected from the society around them. These boundaries are socio-economic and cultural and are often made deeper by racism and discrimination. The second has to do with young persons’ search for identity and status. Such a search in an excluded community is vulnerable to the influence of people who use violence to demonstrate their importance. If that violence is connected with a sense of payback and revenge against those forces that exclude, then the situation is even more volatile.

Boko Haram has killed more than 10,000 people and forced more than a million others to flee. It has captured 30,000 square kilometers of Nigerian territory, has reported links to al-Qaeda, and has been dubbed “Africa’s ISIS.” Nigeria and its neighbors have now proposed a regional taskforce to tackle the brutal Boko Haram insurgency, which has waged war in the northeast of the country since 2009. But will it work? The taskforce would consist of 8,700 military, police, and civilian personnel. It would conduct coordinated military and intelligence operations to prevent Boko Haram’s expansion and to stabilize areas previously under its control. It would also protect civilians, help displaced people to return home and enable some humanitarian assistance. There are, however, deeper issues regarding the conditions that have enabled Boko Haram to flourish, which are beyond the mandate and capacity of any regional intervention force. These include political marginalization and socio-economic underdevelopment in the predominantly Muslim regions of Nigeria’s north, religious radicalization, and wider governance challenges, such as corruption, in the Nigerian polity.

Before many young radical Muslims take up arms with jihadist groups such as the Islamic State (ISIS) and al-Qaeda, they receive their first lessons on radical Islam from madrassas, Islamic schools that serve as an alternative to government or expensive private schools. The 9/11 Commission said these Pakistani schools were “incubators for violent extremism.” Pakistan has anywhere between 10,000 and 30,000 madrasas, many of which have existed since the country’s founding nearly seven decades ago. In the wake of the killing by the Taiban of more than 150 people, most of them high-school students, at an army-run school in December 2014, the attitudes of many Pakistanis toward the madrassas are changing. The government has begun to monitor the funding of these religious schools more tightly, but critics say this is the wrong approach. The problem is not school funding, says one critic. “The actual problem is what’s taught in the madrassa, because that curriculum breeds hatred, violence and legitimizes violence against non-Muslims.”

Today the White House will host community leaders and local law enforcement officials for the second day of a summit on “countering violent extremism,” the purpose of which is to highlight domestic and international efforts to prevent extremists from radicalizing and recruiting individuals or groups in the United States and abroad to commit acts of violence. The administration’s counter extremism efforts reflect an understanding that lone wolf terror acts will continue to be a threat for law enforcement as much as acts by organized groups such as al-Qaeda.