Wippl in the Media on Orlando Nightclub Shooting
Joseph Wippl, Professor of the Practice of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, was interviewed by several media outlets on how law enforcement agencies share information on potential terrorists in the wake of the Orlando nightclub shooting.
Wippl, a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer, was interviewed for a June 13, 2016 segment on WCVB Channel 5 entitled “FBI explains its history with Orlando shooter.” Wippl discussed the FBI’s 2013 investigation of Omar Mateen, the Orlando nightclub shooter, comparing it to the FBI investigation of Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev two years before the bombing.
From the segment:
We can’t be one hundred percent safe, it’s not going to happen. No one is going to be arrested for opinions that they have, and that’s basically what the FBI found in both of these instances.
You can watch the entire segment here.
Wippl was also quoted in a June 13, 2016 article in the Lowell Sun entitled “Sharing Information on Potential Terrorists Critical, Local Law Enforcers Say.“
From the text of the article:
Every state has a Fusion Center, a central location where federal, state and local law-enforcement authorities share information on potential terrorist activity, said Joseph Wippl, a professor at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. But it’s not unusual for areas that have experienced terrorist attacks to have stronger intelligence collecting and sharing protocols than those that have not, he said.
Wippl, who had a 35-year career with the CIA, said there is always an immense amount of intelligence coming in. It’s an ongoing challenge to share the right information, he said, and there aren’t always enough intelligence professionals on the local level to process it.
“In order to winnow out the really important stuff from all the other stuff that’s not important, it takes really professional people who understand what they’re doing and what their objective is,” Wippl said.
Wippl said the key is staying dedicated, and to not lose focus even when things appear quiet.
“The bottom line is, we cannot be 100 percent safe,” he said. “All we can do is the best we can.”
Wippl is a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer. He spent a 30 year career as an operations officer in the National Clandestine Service (NCS). Wippl has served overseas as an operations officer and operations manager in Bonn, West Germany; Guatemala City; Luxembourg; Madrid, Spain; Mexico City; Vienna, Austria; and Berlin, Germany. Learn more about him here.