Following the 9/11 attacks and others across Europe, domestic responses to international terrorism have increased in both scale and perceived importance, but how well are they working? In North America there has not been a significant terrorist event for over a decade, but as Veronica Kitchen tells us in this week's Inside the Issues, that doesn't mean that national security efforts are necessarily functioning as optimally as they should. With a worrying tendency to 'securitize' a wide array of institutions, Kitchen says that we may overestimating the threat of terrorism to our daily lives while more pressing dangers go unnoticed.