Did any of these guys have even anything to do with the internet? Do they even have anything remotely resembling evidence that these guys were radicalized by stuff they found online?

Or is this just yet another case of politicians cashing in on tragedy to ram through unrelated laws that they couldn’t get through otherwise?

Real conspirators are men of few words. They are usually concerned that someone might change sides, or get drunk in a bar and talk to a prostitute, so they tend to restrict important information to the narrowest possible extent. They don’t need cryptography– they get by with simple word codes On Dec 7, 1941, “Climb Mount Nikita” means attack Pearl Harbor, and report success with “Tora, Tora, Tora.” That kind of thing. You can’t detect them by electronic surveillance because there’s nothing to detect.

Now, as to the internet sites, what the Islamic radicals do is to attract young men who have grievances, and get them to talk about their grievances, and separate out the ones who still have grievances after letting off steam, and who are disposed to accept that their personal grievances have political explanations, and invite them to dinner for further talk. The young men gradually get drawn in deeper and deeper, they start living in the section-leader’s attic or something like that, and only at the last stages are they propositioned for illegal action. The conditions in the attic are naturally sufficiently uncomfortable that if a young man has the chance to move into a girl’s apartment, that is obviously a material improvement. The second stage of recruitment is to get the young men living together in the most intimate degree, like Marine recruits in barracks. I very much doubt you can recruit a young man for much of anything while he is still eating at McDonald’s. So government censorship is going to work out in practice to forbidding people to complain that they have lousy jobs, or that their parents don’t understand them, or that girls look at them disdainfully, or that kind of thing.

There is an American military expression: “Ya found a home in the Army.” This expression is usually employed derisively, tauntingly, but it expresses an inner truth.