Nation Confronts a New Menace After San Bernardino Shooting Chilling terror danger seen from extremist sympathizers who, unnoticed by authorities, amass deadly arsenals to attack anywhere in U.S.By Philip Shishkin and Jon Kamp
http://www.wsj.com/articles/nation-confronts-a-new-menace-1449277827
Even with many details about the San Bernardino, Calif., massacre still unknown, law-enforcement officials see a chilling terror danger from extremist sympathizers who, unnoticed by authorities, are able to amass deadly arsenals to attack vulnerable gatherings anywhere in the U.S.
Much about the case has crystallized trends that officials have feared for years: The attackers, a young married couple with a baby, had never surfaced as subjects of any terror investigation and lived apparently ordinary suburban lives while secretly stockpiling guns, ammunition and homemade bombs.
The attacks Wednesday believed carried out by Syed Rizwan Farook, a religious Muslim and U.S. citizen, and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, a native of Pakistan, targeted a gathering of county workers far from any high-profile metropolis. The couple entered the room armed to kill a lot of people, quickly.
“Terrorists have adapted and evolved in order to carry out heinous plots since 9/11, and this tragedy reinforces the need for law enforcement to evolve its intelligence-gathering and investigative techniques,’’ said U.S. Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R., Va.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.
As the shooting rampage was about to begin, authorities said, Ms. Malik posted a message on Facebook pledging her allegiance to the leader of Islamic State. Pipe bombs later found at the couple’s Redlands, Calif., home echoed designs posted online by the al Qaeda publication, Inspire. The Federal Bureau of Investigation said they had evidence the couple showed signs of radicalization.
An Islamic State-linked news agency said the California shootings were carried out by their supporters, part of string of attacks that included those in Paris last month, according to SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks online postings by extremists. The claim couldn’t be verified.
U.S. counterterrorism has long focused on people traveling to and from Syria and Iraq. Now, another threat looms from local terrorism sympathizers inspired to violence by Islamic State, but who act without any direct orders, said Lorenzo Vidino, the director of the Program on Extremism at the Center for Cyber & Homeland Security at George Washington University.
People with sympathies but no formal communication or ties with extremist groups can operate under the radar, he said, until they act. “That’s the big threat,” he said.
Unlike the Paris attacks, which were carried out by people whose friendships and family connections appear to have formed the backbone of one or more terrorist cells, the husband and wife in Wednesday’s attack hadn’t trained in Syria and, so far, don’t appear associated with a terrorist cell.
ENLARGE The San Bernardino attack “shows that a small number of people determined to plan but not boast can get away with it,” said Patrick Skinner, a former case officer with the Central Intelligence Agency. “In this way, terrorism is exactly like any other crime.”
The couple, who were killed Wednesday in a gunbattle with police, apparently sought to hide evidence that might connect them to others, law-enforcement officials said. Two relatively new cellular phones were found smashed in a garbage can and a computer in their townhouse was missing a hard drive. Investigators have subpoenaed email service providers to retrieve any communications.
Some questioned whether U.S. and local law-enforcement officials may have missed signs that the couple had become radicalized. Mr. Farook had communicated with at least one FBI terrorism suspect, for instance. But U.S. law enforcement agencies had no case files on either Mr. Farook, an environmental-health specialist who worked for San Bernardino County, or his wife, whom Mr. Farook married during a trip to Saudi Arabia, where she had lived most of her life.
The U.S. has seen similarly motivated attacks. In May, two Phoenix men were killed in a Dallas suburb after they opened fire outside an event that featured cartoon drawings of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad.
One of the men, Elton Simpson, was convicted in 2011 of making a false statement to the FBI after prosecutors said he had planned to join Islamic militant groups in Africa, and then lied about those plans to federal agents, court records show. The other, Nadir Soofi, had grown interested in radical Islamist websites and in Anwar al-Awlaki, the U.S.-born al Qaeda leader whose preaching he had started to follow, his mother told The Wall Street Journal.
ENLARGE In a report released just days before the California shootings, researchers at George Washington University tracked the evolution of Islamist extremism in the U.S. by combing through recent arrests, indictments and convictions for Islamic State-related activities. They found a sharp surge of jihadist activities in the U.S., when compared with the years after the 9/11 attacks.
“In the last few months and weeks we’ve seen online a number of ISIS supporters saying it is tough to travel to join the caliphate, but there are things you can do in the homeland,” said Seamus Hughes, a former official at the National Counterterrorism Center, and one of the report’s authors.
Security and management consultant Ed Davis, who was Boston’s police commissioner in April 2013, when two brothers planted homemade bombs near the Boston Marathon finish line, said the U.S. allowed the couple to buy thousands of bullets without setting off FBI alarm bells. “There should be triggers for that,” he said.
The risk of radicalization has increased, in part, due to better communications technology and widely available encryption tools. “This is the scary part: Technology is such that folks can have secure access to information and plans and have contact with folks located in combat zones in the Middle East,” said David Miller, a partner at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP and a former assistant U.S. attorney in Manhattan, who worked on the first prosecution of a homegrown terrorist cell since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. “And then you have the technological ease by which people can get information on things like building explosives or how to encrypt communications.”
He added: “This is going to continue to be the challenge of our time.”
In his case, three men from suburbs of Toledo were convicted in 2008 of recruiting and training terrorists to kill American soldiers. Mr. Miller said they fed their radicalization with violent jihad videos they accessed on password-protected Internet sites and through relationships they cultivated online with terrorists in war zones.
The government made its case with the help of an ex-Special Forces soldier who gained the trust of three men by presenting himself as a disenchanted veteran out for revenge against the U.S.
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