The Security Mentor

Tough question: it's not like you can do a survey.

It can't be all that many. Look how much damage and loss of life 19 caused. But add in finance guys, safehouse operators, and recruiters. Then add instructors for the training campe, and figure there are enough going through to make it worthwhile to keep training camps open.

So, speculating, more than hundreds, but not too many thousands. If there were as many as ten thousand fanatical mass murderers out there eager to cause mass casualties, we'd be hurting bigtime.

The National Counterterrorism Center collected 325,000 names on its list of suspects. It's only 200,000 or so when you remove duplicates and aliases.

The hazards of lists are that it's easy to put people on them, but ,not easy to take them off; all the incentives are to make lists long so as to justify funding; everyone will think the list is authotitative; and people will use the information to decide whether to shoot you seven times in the head.