Less than 24 hours after French authorities killed Mohamed Merah, the man allegedly behind the tragic massacre in Toulouse, French President Nicolas Sarkozy proposed a sweeping new law that would criminalize habitual visits to web sites that advocate for terror. “Anyone who regularly consults Internet sites which promote terror or hatred or violence will be sentenced to prison,” Sarkozy said.

At about the same time across the channel in England, the Guardian reported that a joint House of Commons and Lords committee has called for the introduction of legislation that would require Google and other search engines to “take steps to ensure that their websites are not used as vehicles to breach the law and should actively develop and use such technology.”
Similarly restrictive measures are hardly unheard of here in America. In November 2011, Sen. Joe Lieberman (CT-I) sent a letter to Google seeking a terrorism “flag” system be implemented on all their blogs. As evidence of the need for such a system, the Lieberman letter cited the arrest days earlier of a New York resident, Jose Pimentel, for allegedly “constructing a pipe bomb” to be used against U.S. military personnel, and said that his website is “just one of the many examples of homegrown terrorists Google-hosted sites to propagate their violent ideology.”
Official concern about the “lone-wolf” terrorist is not limited to the French president or a controversial Senator.  Last August, President Barack Obama said he feared a “lone-wolf operation” more than a “large, well-coordinated terrorist attack.” This was echoed by the FBI on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. “Our great fear is a self-radicalized individual, or an individual who has been radicalized through modern media, who makes a decision to act on his own,” said one FBI official last September.
But do the facts about the “lone wolf” threat warrant this level of rhetoric or the expanse of virtually unchecked government surveillance dedicated to preventing it?
In the case of Pimentel, it depends on who you ask. If you talk to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg or NYPD, they might tell you he had been under police surveillance for more than two years before his arrest.  The Deputy NYPD Commissioner Paul Browne said, “We continue to be concerned about terrorist Internet publications, which were used most recently by Jose Pimentel.”
But ask someone at the FBI and you would learn that it chose not to pursue a case against him for lack of evidence.  In fact, the NYPD reportedly tried to get the FBI involved in its investigation into Pimentel on two separate occasions, and both times the FBI declined.  The New York Times reported that the case is unusual in that it marked only the second time this year that NYPD and the Manhattan district attorney’s office “have brought terrorism-related charges in state court, which in the past have been almost exclusively prosecuted in federal courts.”
But what about high-profile cases, like the Nidal Hussein’s shooting at Fort Hood in 2009 or Faisal Shahzad, who pleaded guilty to attempting to blow up a vehicle carrying a homemade bomb in Times Square in May 2010? Do these examples of actual or attempted attacks indicate a burgeoning threat to America posed by rogue individuals?
Michael German, a former FBI counterterrorism agent who now works on national security issues at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said the “lone wolf” threat is being overstated. “It’s not a non-existent problem, but certainly not something new and growing,” German said.
But unlike the murky details surrounding the arrest of Pimental or others who often are duped by law enforcement agents posing as collaborators in fake terror plots, the statistics on domestic attacks tell a much different story.
Brian Jenkins, senior adviser to the president at the RAND Corporation and a former captain in the Green Berets who has studied terrorism recruitment for decades, says the threat, and subsequent response by the government, is vastly exaggerated. Speaking at a CATO event on April 13, 2012, Jenkins said there is “no army of sleepers, no vast underground” of agents in the U.S. waiting to attack. In fact, after analyzing terror-related threats or attacks since 9/11 in America, he found only 6 per 100,000 people are involved in a domestic terror attack- an especially “low yield,” considering that the U.S. prison population is approximately 750 per 100,000 over the same period.  The number is so low, Jenkins eschews the term “lone wolf” in his latest book on terrorism recruitment because he says the behavior of these few individuals “more closely resembles that of stray dogs.”
German and Jenkins are not alone in believing that the government is over-playing the threat. Claims of “homegrown” terrorists become “radicalized” online have become commonplace to justify the support for legislation and policies that increase surveillance on law abiding citizens and censor free speech on the internet.  According to Glenn Greenwald, “the central linchpin of endless war and civil liberties erosions is keeping fear levels high. Foreign al Qaeda villains once served that role, and Homegrown Terrorists have now replaced them.” He provides several examples of officials using the homegrown threat as justification for extreme policies that take away our basic civil liberties, including:
“A full ten years after the 9/11 attack, the indefinite detention provisions of the NDAA were codified into law (Lindsey Graham: “Homegrown terrorism is a real threat. There are a lot of people being radicalized on the Internet”). The CIA and the NYPD jointly created a domestic surveillance program to infiltrate mosques in the U.S. based on this constant emphasis on this “Homegrown” threat. A group of bipartisan members of Congress, led by Joe Lieberman, have introduced the “Terrorist Expatriation Act” to strip Americans of their citizenship based on claims they are associated with Terrorism (“This Act will provide another important tool for our military and intelligence communities to use against homegrown terrorists”). Miranda rights have been curtailed for domestic Terror suspects.”

Overreacting to individual acts of terror by curbing freedoms represents a greater threat to our society than the potential destruction caused by a lone wolf. But by using these types of attacks as the justification for sweeping new laws and restrictions on our rights and liberties, would-be attackers may conclude that relatively modest acts of violence are likely to achieve a disproportionately large impact.

The causes of violent extremism are complex and multidimensional, and the strategies to deal with them need to be as well. An effective strategy will emphasize the importance of gauging threats and their responses appropriately and proportionally.  That way, it will thwart the conditions that nurture violent extremism and work to prevent the recruitment of the next generation of would be attackers, but not at the expense of our way of life.