That, in a nutshell, was the FBI’s muscling approach to counterterrorism in 2006: If you tell me there’s a terrorist in California, I will go to California and look at every human being in the state. Muscling was driven by fear—the fear of missing something. Our biggest fear after 9/11 was that more people in the U.S. were connected to al-Qaeda or similar groups. That fear proved legitimate.
