ISIS and the "Internet Radicalization' Trope

Nearly a week after the attacks in San Bernardino, the picture of the attackers and what drove them remains murky. The husband-and-wife team of Syed Rizwan Farook, an American citizen, and Tashfeen Malik, a permanent resident who FBI officials said pledged loyalty to the Islamic State on Facebook shortly before the shootings, were both killed fleeing the scene and are now the subject of an evolving investigation into the impetus for their radical act. At a news conference on Monday, David Bowdich, the assistant director of the FBI’s Los Angeles office, told reporters that the pair had been “radicalized” for “quite some time” but “the question for us is how and by whom and where were they radicalized? Maybe there’s not a ‘by whom.’ Remember, oftentimes it’s on the Internet. We just don’t know.”