DETROIT — The nature of terrorist threats against the United States has changed since Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Christopher Wray led the prosecution at the Justice Department against one of the men who carried out the World Trade Center attack in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001.
Threats are now largely posed by people with anti-government and white supremacist agendas, Wray said Friday at a lecture on the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor, compared with the attack from overseas carried out on 9/11. Today's plots require far fewer people, far less planning and offer far fewer clues to investigators charged with stopping them, he said.
"They're not doing some spectacular attack, they're using some easily accessible weapon like a gun, a knife, a crude IED you can figure out how to build on the internet," Wray said. "And they're attacking not the World Trade Center with a commercial airliner. They're attacking what the intelligence community calls 'soft targets,' which is basically just everyday people living their everyday lives."
