Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said in front of a Senate Armed Services Committee today that the terror threat against the United States is expanding and revealed 2014 as the deadliest year on record for attacks around the world.
"When the final accounting is done, 2014 will have been the most lethal year for global terrorism in the 45 years such data has been compiled," Clapper said, detailing thousands of attacks throughout the year.
Just yesterday Secretary of State John Kerry said in front of the House Foreign Affairs Committee that the world is safer than ever from terror.
"We are actually living in a period of less daily threat to Americans and to people in the world than normally; less deaths, less violent deaths today, than through the last century," Kerry said.
Last summer, President Obama echoed that by saying the world is "less violent" than ever.
"[T]he truth of the matter is that for all the challenges we face, all the problems that we have, if you had to be — if you had to choose any moment to be born in human history, not knowing what your position was going to be, who you were going to be, you’d choose this time," Obama said. "The world is less violent than it has ever been. It is healthier than it has ever been. It is more tolerant than it has ever been. It is better fed then it’s ever been. It is more educated than it’s ever been."
According to an NBC/WSJ survey released in September 2014, 47 percent of Americans now feel less safe than they did before 9/11.