Clint Watts

Clint Watts is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and at the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security at the George Washington University, as well as a national security contributor for NBC News and MSNBC. He’s the author of the book "Messing with the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians and Fake News." Watts also holds the position of General Manager at the Digital Threat Analysis Center (DTAC) at Microsoft, a role he assumed after Microsoft acquired his consulting firm, Miburo Solutions.

His research and writing focus on terrorism, counterterrorism, social media influence, and Russian disinformation. Clint’s Tracking of terrorist foreign fighters allowed him to predict the rise of the Islamic State of al Qaeda in 2014. From 2014-2016, Clint led a team of researchers who tracked and modeled the rise of Russian Influence operations via social media leading up to the U.S. Presidential election of 2016. This research led Clint to testify before four different Senate committees in 2017 and 2018 regarding Russia’s information warfare campaign against the U.S. and the West. Watts has also made headlines for his testimony before the United States Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs about the Paris attacks and the Brussels bombings.

Clint’s writing has appeared in a range of publications, including the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Daily Beast, Politico, Lawfare, War on the Rocks, World Politics Review, and the Huffington Post. He has also written for The Daily Beast about Russian propaganda fabricated articles being popularized by social media, and he collaborated with colleagues to document how disinformation spread from Russian state-controlled media organizations to pro-Russian accounts on Twitter.

Before becoming a consultant, Clint served as a U.S. Army infantry officer, an FBI Special Agent, the Executive Officer of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point (CTC), a consultant to the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division (CTD) and National Security Branch (NSB), and as a counterterrorism analyst on a range of programs supporting the U.S. Intelligence Community and U.S. Special Operations Command. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree from the United States Military Academy and a Master of Arts degree from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.