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There are also considerably more Muslims in America today than there were in 1990. Reliable figures on the number of U.S. Muslims are hard to come by, but even the most conservative estimate (1.3 million, almost certainly too low) shows the Muslim population more than doubled from 1990 to 2008.

That creates a bigger pool from which jihadists can recruit, but it doesn’t mean that the number of jihadists, as a percentage of the American Muslim population, has increased by leaps and bounds. It should be stressed that only a tiny percentage of American Muslims are drawn into violent extremism, but it should also be recognized that Muslims represent the pool in which jihadists cast their lines. Based on the admittedly incomplete data, it appears likely that the percentage of American Muslims drawn into jihadist activity has increased somewhat but is not dramatically higher than it was in 1990.

The odds of developing credible data covering the last thirty years are slim, so the numbers game becomes something of a dead end. But we can observe, much more directly, that the Internet is creating a significant change in the patterns of radicalization and the types of people who make the decision to go from talk to action.

During the 1980s and the 1990s, recruits for jihad overseas most often entered combat from the perspective of defending Muslims from fairly unambiguous acts of aggression by non-Muslims, and they tended to be selected by recruiters or self-selected on the basis that they would be good in a fight—for instance, if they had military training. Candidates were usually filtered through a network of recruiters who helped screen volunteers and direct them to settings where they could be most useful.

For many, perhaps most, of these first-phase recruits, sophisticated ideological structures came only after they had decided to become combatants. When they arrived at the camps, itching for combat, they were instead subjected to days or weeks of religious indoctrination before they were allowed to take part in military training, let alone fight.

That’s not to say that pre-9/11 recruits were oblivious to more advanced jihadist ideas—for instance, the ambition to create Islamic states or takfiri ideas about killing infidels (even when the infidels were Muslims). Some were preconditioned with these ideas, through exposure to ideologues such as Omar Abdel Rahman, but others were simply attracted to the miracles described by Abdullah Azzam or moved by mainstream media reporting about atrocities in Bosnia. Even those who had a more thorough grounding in abstract jihadist theology were absorbing those lessons through a relatively limited number of sources.

Religious indoctrination at the camps was tightly controlled by al Qaeda and a handful of loosely related organizations working from more or less the same playbook, including Lashar-e-Tayyiba and the Islamic Group. Instruction was delivered within a controlled environment, where cultlike indoctrination techniques such as dislocation and isolation helped reinforce the message. This more structured environment created jihadists who were, generally speaking, more formidable and more consistent in their beliefs.

In the post-9/11 era, two major changes worked together to dramatically alter the model. First, the invasion of Afghanistan virtually destroyed the existing network of al Qaeda training camps and drove non-Qaeda camps deep underground. It became much harder (though far from impossible) to travel to the fields of jihad and receive a decent education. The reconstituted camps in Pakistan operated under a cloak of extreme secrecy in a much more restrictive environment than before. In the United States, the environment for recruiters deteriorated in a corresponding manner, with mosques clamping down on the public airing of extremist rhetoric.

At the same time, the use of the Internet launched a decade of sustained and often explosive growth, not only for jihadists