THE UNCERTAINTY DEPARTMENT

Office of Recursive Threat Assessment

STRATEGIC AMBIGUITY MEMORANDUM NO. 31 Classification: Unclassified // For Open Distribution // Please Do Not Cite This as Precedent, We Are Already Worried

On the Structural Risks of Reflexive Domestic Terrorism Designation: A Preliminary Feedback-Loop Analysis

Executive Summary

This memorandum examines a hypothetical but increasingly plausible administrative pathway in which agencies, agents, or components of the United States government formally designate other agencies, agents, or components of the United States government — or, in edge cases, themselves — as terrorist organizations, terrorist supporters, or terrorism-adjacent entities of concern. We term this the Reflexive Designation Problem (RDP).

Our central finding is that the RDP does not resolve into a stable equilibrium. It resolves into a loop. Once a government begins treating “is this a terrorist organization” as a question that its own components can ask about other components — rather than a question asked exclusively about external actors — the designation apparatus loses its reference point. Absent an external reference point, the apparatus begins referencing itself. This is structurally identical to pointing a security camera at a monitor displaying its own feed: technically functional, informationally void, and prone to producing content no one intended and everyone is now responsible for.

We do not believe this scenario is likely in its most extreme form. We believe several milder forms of it are already underway, are individually defensible, and are collectively alarming in the way that a single loose thread is individually defensible and collectively the reason your sweater no longer has sleeves.

1. The Premise, Stated Plainly

Terrorism designation authority in the United States is distributed across multiple statutory regimes (material support statutes, Executive Order 13224, the FTO list, various state-level analogues, and a penumbra of “domestic violent extremism” frameworks that are policy rather than statute, which is precisely the problem). This distribution was designed on the implicit assumption that the designator and the designated would never be the same institutional family. Nothing in the architecture actually prevents that assumption from failing. It simply hasn’t failed yet, in the same way a ladder hasn’t fallen over yet.

Once any component — a task force, a bureau, a state attorney general acting under color of federal cooperation, an inspector general with an expansive reading of “material support” — designates another government-adjacent entity as terrorism-linked, the system has crossed from external threat classification into internal taxonomic warfare. At that point, the designation apparatus is no longer a perimeter. It is a mirror maze with subpoena power.

2. The Loop, Diagrammed in Prose

Consider the following sequence, which we present not as prediction but as the shape the feedback takes once initiated:

1. Agency A designates a program, task force, or informal network within Agency B as engaged in conduct meeting the domestic terrorism definitional threshold (a definition broad enough, notably, to have been satisfied at various points by labor organizers, environmentalists, and at least one Boy Scout troop, depending on which decade’s DOJ guidance you consult).
2. Agency B, now under investigatory and reputational pressure, initiates a counter-review. In the course of that review it discovers, or asserts, that Agency A’s designation authority was itself exercised through a process that meets the definition of “material support for a designation campaign” — because Agency A’s referral relied on informants, and informant networks are, definitionally, support networks, and support networks are the thing the statute was written to catch.
3. Agency B designates the designating unit within Agency A.
4. Congress, or an Inspector General, or a Special Master, now must determine which designation is operative. There is no statutory tiebreaker for this, because no one anticipated needing one, in the same way building codes do not specify what happens if a house tries to condemn itself.
5. Both designations remain technically live pending review. Federal employees on both sides are now, on paper, simultaneously terrorism suspects and terrorism investigators. Their security clearances do not know what to do with this and, per our sources, neither do the clearance-adjudication algorithms, several of which were not built with recursive inputs in mind and have begun producing what one analyst described only as “concerning drift.”
6. Press coverage of Step 5 is characterized by both sides as evidence supporting their designation, because press attention is, per current domestic-extremism guidance in several jurisdictions, itself a factor weighed in threat assessment. The coverage becomes evidence for the thing the coverage is about.
7. Return to Step 1, except now there are three designations instead of one, and one of them concerns a court reporter who was just trying to do her job.

We refer to Step 6 as the Attention Confirms Threat Trap, and we consider it the single most dangerous node in the loop, because it is the node that requires no bad faith from anyone to operate. It runs on ordinary journalism.

3. Why This Is Not Merely a Joke, Regrettably

Skeptical readers — and we hope you remain one, it is the correct posture for reading anything we produce — will note that formal interagency terrorism designation of a federal rival is presently unlikely, because it would require officials to formally assert, on the record, that the United States government contains a terrorist organization, which is a sentence with obvious downstream consequences for legitimacy, insurance, appropriations, and the general morale of people who show up to work at these buildings every day believing they work for the government rather than against a faction of it that also happens to be the government.

We agree this is unlikely at the federal-vs-federal level, for now. Our concern is with the subfederal and quasi-federal analogues, which face none of these inhibitions and several of which have already produced instructive dry runs:

• State-vs-federal designation gestures, where a state legislature or AG’s office frames a federal agency’s conduct using terrorism-adjacent statutory language (material support, RICO-terrorism hybrids) without a formal FTO-style designation — a rhetorical dry run that establishes the vocabulary without yet triggering the machinery.
• Federal-vs-state-adjacent designation, running the same play in the opposite direction, targeting state or local task forces framed as radicalized or captured.
• Agency-vs-contractor designation, where a private entity performing government functions is designated, and then argues in its defense that it was merely executing government instructions — at which point the designation functionally, if not formally, points back at whoever issued the instructions.

None of these is the full loop. Each of them is a rehearsal of the loop’s grammar. Institutions that rehearse a grammar tend, eventually, to use it in a full sentence.

4. Second-Order Effects, or: Who Actually Suffers From a Metaphor

The comic framing of this memo should not obscure that feedback loops of this kind have a body count of paperwork, and paperwork has a body count of people. Specifically:

• Personnel caught in dual designation face indefinite clearance limbo, since adjudication processes assume a stable input (one subject, one status) and were not built for a subject who is simultaneously flagged and flagging.
• Whistleblower protections degrade, because “reporting misconduct” and “providing material support to a hostile internal faction” become, under sufficiently motivated reading, the same act described by two different departments.
• Public trust degrades fastest of all, not because the public tracks the mechanics, but because the public is very good at pattern-matching “the government is calling itself a terrorist organization” to “something is deeply wrong here,” which is, to be fair to the public, correct.

5. Recommendations

We offer these not because we expect them adopted, but because a briefing paper that identifies a doom loop without offering an off-ramp is itself a kind of institutional malpractice, and we would rather not designate ourselves.

1. Establish a statutory tiebreaker for competing internal designations — a single reviewing body with authority to suspend both designations pending adjudication, rather than allowing dual-live status by default.
2. Exempt press coverage and public attention from threat-factor weighting in domestic-extremism guidance, closing the Attention Confirms Threat Trap at its most mechanical point.
3. Require a cooling-off period between any interagency referral invoking terrorism-adjacent statutory language and any public characterization of that referral, so that Step 1 and Step 6 cannot occur in the same news cycle.
4. Conduct a tabletop exercise, ideally before this document is overtaken by events, in which participants are asked to determine, live, who has jurisdiction to designate the jurisdiction-granting body. We predict this exercise ends either in useful reform or in everyone agreeing never to speak of it again. We would consider either outcome a form of progress.

The Office of Recursive Threat Assessment thanks the reader for their attention, which, per Section 2, may now be entered into evidence.