Messing with the Enemy

On the occasion of the publication of his first book, we are pleased to feature a talk by former Army officer and FBI special agent Clint Watts, now a Robert Fox Fellow at FPRI and a national security analyst for NBC. In this gripping book, Watts recounts his years of work tracking terrorists online and how he stumbled onto Russian trolls in 2014, leading him to focus on Russian influence operations in social media. When he testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee in March 2017, he electrified the nation. Watts was among the first to shed light on the phenomenon of foreign fighters entering and exiting Iraq, among the first to observe fracturing within Al Qaeda and the rise of ISIS as the leading terrorism player, and among the first to explain not how Russia hacked American voting booths but how they hacked American minds.