ITHACA -- Osama Bin Laden may be gone but Cornell University Professor Matthew Brashears says the threat from terrorists is far from over.
"There is still groups that wish to do the United States and its allies harm and there are groups that are going to try and continue to do that," he says.
Brashears is part of a team of professors around the country working on a three year grant from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. Brashears says his main focus is to help the government develop a model to identify and track candidates likely to use weapons of mass destruction to launch a terrorist attack.
"What we are trying to do is track down individuals who have the necessary skills and training to create one of the devices successfully and who are likely to be recruited," he says.
To do that Brashears and graduate students Mike Genkin and Chan Suh, spend a lot of time looking for new ways to track potential terrorists online. A high tech, high stakes game of cat and mouse that Brashears says is constantly changing.
" Periodically the terrorists will develop new ways to get around what we are doing than we have to innovate right back. The trick is to stay ahead of the curve," he says.
