It sounds like a fanciful script for a Hollywood thriller: foreign government agents plotting assassinations in the United States.
To be sure, there have been suspected state-sponsored killings in the past 20 years that have grabbed international headlines. Former Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko’s poisoning with a radioactive isotope in London in 2006 is one example; the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at a Saudi diplomatic facility in Istanbul in 2018 is another.
And just this month, Maksim Kuzminov, a Russian pilot who defected to Ukraine after Russia’s full-scale invasion, was found shot dead in southern Spain. The Kremlin declined to comment on the case, but there are suspicions Kuzminov’s killing could have been a Russian-ordered assassination.
None of those took place in the United States. But in the past few years, there have been assassination plots aplenty in the U.S. In just the past 18 months, the Justice Department says it has foiled four of them on American soil.
Full story: DOJ says it has foiled 4 state-sponsored murder attempts since 2022 : NPR
Assassination attempts are something that we should take very seriously. So many new technologies in today’s world could make these attempts easier. On the contrary, many of these new technologies can also lead to better recognition of these attempts before they happen. While the data shows an increase in assassination attempts lately, I feel like this has always been a risk in our country. I do not feel as though the risk is becoming greater, rather that we can determine the risk quicker and easier in today’s society. A major question is, with so many international conflicts happening as well as our nation’s criminal justice systems suffering, should more resources be going to protection from international affairs such as assassination attempts, or go into funding and equipping our own police departments?