On the campaign trail, Biden promised to end the Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention Program (TVTP). He did… by recycling the same broken countering violent extremism framework into a new counterterrorism grant program. Under Biden’s DHS, TVTP heads to the acronym graveyard, and federal dollars will instead flow into the newly created Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships (CP3). DHS couches the new program in language about upholding civil liberties, implicitly acknowledging past issues with CVE/TVTP programs. However, the changes are more style than substance. DHS insists that CP3 won’t be used to target Muslims (though there’s no guarantee a future administration won’t change that). But changing priorities doesn’t change that the countering violent extremism framework relies on profiling – whether religious, racial, or political – to funnel certain people towards law enforcement. While it’s good news that DHS’s grants no longer consider obviously-biased markers like wearing hijab a warning sign for terrorism, CP3 suffers from the same fatal flaw as previous programs: radicalization theory. Radicalization theory is the debunked idea that adoption of certain ideologies sets people on a trajectory towards violence. This is demonstrably false. Even the strongest studies cited by DHS find only weak commonalities between people who commit violence, and no indicators whatsoever with reliable predictive power. The primary flaw of CP3-style programs is obvious: of people who hold an ideology, only an infinitesimal fraction will ever commit violence. Accepting the false premise that ideologies in some way inexorably predispose people to violence opens the door for invasive and politically-biased government surveillance. In the press release announcing CP3, DHS highlights increased intelligence gathering and information sharing following the January 6 attack on the capitol. CONTINUE READING