Amna Nawaz:
Taylor Swift’s Eras tour has been cancelled in Austria after authorities arrested two teenagers accused of planning a terrorist attack. Concert promoter Barracuda Music said: “We have no choice but to cancel the three planned shows for everyone’s safety.”
Around 200,000 people were expected to attend the sold-out Vienna concerts.
To explore this in more detail, I will meet with Juliette Kayyem, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and former deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
Juliette, thank you for being with us.
The fact that the promoters had to cancel the shows, what does that tell you about how serious and how imminent these threats were?
Juliette Kayyem, former US Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary: “This says two things: First, that the situation was not only serious, but that it was probably disrupted hours before extreme violence could have occurred.”
And I think they canceled for two reasons. First, there was an insider threat. One of the two teenagers had connections to one of the subcontractors and may have had credentials that would have allowed him in. As soon as there’s an insider threat, you shut down because you have no idea who else might be in the room.
Second, the threat appears to have taken place outside the concert hall rather than inside. Anyone who has seen these pictures from the Eras tour knows that there are a lot of people with tickets. There are a lot of people without tickets who want to have the experience, want to hear her, want to be part of the Taylor Swift movement.
If – and that – those parts are not protected. And so I think that given the threat that we currently know of both from insider threats and from attacks on the vulnerabilities of concert security, it was right and appropriate to close the concert until the threat was understood.
