Silber was never a police officer who walked a beat. He established his policy credentials by serving on a task force of the Council on Foreign Relations addressing terrorist financing for 9/11 and then went on to be compensated for his hypocrisy during a gig as expert on “capital markets intelligence” at the Carson Group, a private equity firm that serves the super-rich.
In the Atlantic Council report, Silber draws on policy proposals he made previously in his controversial report “Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat” for NYPD. That report was condemned (and eventually removed from the NYPD website) by the Brennan Center for Justice because of the radical religious and racial profiling that he proposed for local law enforcement, including the suggestion that common Islamic religious practices indicate extremism.In Silber’s hands, however, the event becomes a justification for big bureaucratic budgets. He explains that this “intelligence failure” means that we need a DVEAU (Domestic Violent Extremism Unit) under the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), an existing bureaucracy that currently reports to the Director of National Intelligence. The timing of the proposal was linked to the announcement by DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on May 11, 2021 that a domestic terrorism branch will be revived within DHS Intelligence & Analysis (I&A).