“My fear is that the Boston bombers may have succeeded because our system failed,” said Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, chairman of the House Homeland Security committee at the first public Congressional hearing on the terrorist attack.

“We learned over a decade ago, the danger in failing to connect the dots. The cornerstone of the 9/11 Commission Report was that agencies had stove-piped and intelligence, which prevented us from seeing potential terrorist plots,” McCaul said.

In the 9/11 attacks, U.S. intelligence agencies had information regarding the hijackers prior to the attacks, yet the agencies weren’t communicating with one another.  From these events, the Department of Homeland Security was created, along with other government agencies, and the U.S. took stronger measurements to prevent future terrorism acts.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and brother, Dzhokhar, 19, carried out the attack at the Boston Marathon.  It’s been reported that Russian authorities notified the CIA and FBI, on separate accounts, about Tamerlan possibly becoming radicalized and seeking more fuel from groups in Dagestan, part of the North Caucasus of Russia and home of Islamist militants.

Tamerlan was put on the U.S. Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment database in late 2011, which keeps a list of all terrorism suspects and has reached 875,000 names. It’s maintained by the National Counterterrorism Center. The information on the list is available to all counterterrorism professionals throughout the Intelligence Community, including the Department of Defense, according to a description on its website.

But according to an LA Times article, this database doesn’t serve as a watch list.

“The database is so large and the records can be so vague that there often is little a law enforcement agency is willing or able to do in response to a TIDE match,” wrote the author. Therefore, “too vague to flag Boston suspect.”

This year, the Government Accountability Office, which serves as a watchdog, found that the sharing and managing of terrorism-related information between government agencies is a “high risk.” The GAO updates this high-risk list every two years with programs that need continued attention “due to their vulnerabilities to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement, or are most in need of transformation.” The report found that the federal government is working to better the sharing of information but said it has  “not yet estimated and planned for the resources needed” to tackle this issue.

Michael Weiser, who studied international relations and Middle East politics at Tel-Aviv University and California State University said communication across all government agencies is important, but isn’t sure if the Boston attacks could have been prevented.

“In this case it might have increased the chance of detection, but I don’t know it if would have been decisive,” Weiser said.

The problem, he said, is many think of terrorism threats coming from a specific region.

“The radicalized Islamist movement is not necessarily isolated to a localized area,” Weiser said, adding that it could come from anywhere from the Philippines to Yemen to America. But cautioned that he does not know whether or not federal agencies examined Tamerlan with this in mind.

“The idea is to think globally. Jihadism is a global movement,” he said.

With this, some believe the focus should now be on homegrown terrorism and also cyber-radicalization, like extremists who post videos on YouTube that can reach millions across the world. Even President Barack Obama has said he believes the brothers acted alone in the attacks.

“One of the dangers that we now face are self-radicalized individuals who are already here in the United States,” Obama said at a news conference.

A New York Times article reports that the “Tsarnaev brothers appear to have been radicalized and instructed in explosives not at a training camp but at home on the Internet.” The author writes that Dzhokhar told investigators that he and his brother followed manuals and “do-it-yourself articles” on how to carry out attacks in the U.S. without having to go abroad.

With this being an ongoing investigation, there will be many more details revealed as time comes.  But, I will have to agree with Weiser that we, as a nation, have to start looking at these events as a “global threat” rather than coming from one specific region or area. We must also examine how agencies can control the growing trend of cyber-radicalization.

His hatred cast a wide net—from liberal political parties he called “cultural Marxists” to feminists and multiculturalists.

But no group received more ire than Muslims. According to Breivik, his hours-long rampage, in which he systematically massacred dozens of people, would precipitate a decades-long crusade culminating in the execution and expulsion of Muslims from Europe.

Breivik backed his ideology with numerous quotes from American anti-Islam and Tea Party activists, which he praised as the “the first physical, political manifestation which [sic] indicates there is a great storm coming.”

He also encouraged unity between right-wing groups internationally, and with the recent re-emergence of right-wing militias and anti-Islamic groups in the U.S., the threat of a domestic terrorism incident may be much closer than Scandinavia, say terrorism experts both in and out of the government.

In the Spring 2011 issue of  “Year in Hate,” Southern Poverty Law Center reported that the number of right-wing extremist and hate groups in the United States shot above 1,000 for the first time since they began tracking them more than 30 years ago. It also reported that anti-government and militia groups have increased five-fold since the election of the nation’s first black president. Although the prevalence of these groups always surges during a Democratic presidency, the sharpness of this increase is without precedent, the report said.

At the same time, the U.S. has seen a rise in “anti-sharia” groups like Jihad Watch and Society for National Existence, which claim that Muslims in the U.S. are attempting to institute a brutal law enforcement code that would include lashing and stoning.

Asifa Quraishi, assistant law professor at the University of Wisconsin and a comparative Islamic and U.S. constitutional law expert, said these groups’ inaccuracies start at the very definition of sharia.

“Sharia means ‘the path’ and is the way God asks Muslims to live in the world. The specific details of how to do that are not always answered in the Quran or other writings,” she said.

The human interpretation of sharia is called fiqh—or understanding—of which there are six main schools of thought that vary in specifics.

“Much of it is quite compatible with the rule of law in the U.S., like property rights, rules of inheritance and contracts by mutual consent,” she said.

Yet the anti-sharia movement has gained such a foothold that more than a dozen states have passed legislation banning its use. In Oklahoma, 71 percent of voters chose to ban sharia—although the bill has since been struck down in the courts.

In recent months, Tea Party presidential candidates Rick Santorum and Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., have signed pledges rejecting “Sharia Islam [sic] and all other anti-woman, anti-human rights forms of totalitarian control.” Fellow presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has also denounced sharia.

David Yerushalmi, whom the New York Times recently called “the father of the anti-sharia movement,” said the threat of sharia is real, citing a case in New Jersey in which a Moroccan woman accused her husband of rape and assault. The judge ruled against her, saying that since they had both agreed to a marriage under Islamic law, she was required to comply with her husband’s demands for sex. The decision was later overturned.

“The very telos [philosophy] of sharia is world domination and a hegemonic political order predicated upon sharia. The methods to achieve that telos include violence as in jihad,” he said in an email interview.

Breivik used language like this, ample in the blogosphere, to justify his actions. He cited Jihad Watch founder Robert Spencer 52 times in his manifesto, reprinting full essays on several occasions. He also praised Pamela Geller, who runs the Atlas Shrugs blog and was integral in the campaign against the Park51 Islamic community center in Lower Manhattan last year. Both have denounced Breivik’s actions and any culpability in the attacks.

“If anyone incited him to violence, it was Islamic supremacists,” Geller said on her blog.

Spencer emphasized that he has never advocated violence. Yerushalmi called the idea “patently absurd” and “childish.”

In a recent report on domestic terrorism, the FBI said the greatest threat to the U.S. were so-called lone-wolf terrorists, “who commit acts of violence…without the prior approval or knowledge of these groups’ leaders.”

Although Breivik fits this description, critics also say it isn’t that simple. While leaders of the campaign against Park51 didn’t advocate violence, YouTube videos of the demonstrations show multiple assaults on Muslims and people perceived to Muslim by protestors.

While an act of anti-Muslim domestic terrorism has yet to occur in the U.S., Quraishi believes another lone wolf may have been incited to violence by extremist rhetoric: Jared Lee Loughner, the high school dropout charged with a shooting spree that killed six people and injured 14 others, including Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

“If we allow our conversation to get to that point just on political issues, if that can happen, I worry it could move over to Muslims,” she said. “But I would hope we could see Norway as a lesson and would give us pause. Otherwise we’re no better than the terrorists.”

Timothy McVeigh, who was convicted and executed for detonating a bomb in Oklahoma City in 1995, was charged with 11 felony counts that included use of a weapon of mass destruction and eight counts of first-degree murder — but not terrorism.

So what’s the difference?

Matthew Lippmann, who is a professor of criminology, law and justice at the University of Illinois in Chicago, said the United States only recently began charging people with terrorism.

“What we’re looking at are conventional crimes, but they’re prosecuted under a particular statute that allows the government to prosecute them much more harshly,” he said.

Chapter 113B of Title 18 of the United States Code addresses federal crimes that are considered terrorism, which include use of weapons of mass destruction and the bombing of public places, as well as providing support to terrorists.

The Administrative Office of the United States Courts identifies a crime as terrorism if the defendant is charged with at least one of the terrorism offenses in the code, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. Using this definition, more than 300 people were prosecuted for terrorism in federal court from FY 2004 to April 2009.

Charles E. Tucker Jr., who is executive director of the International Human Rights Institute at DePaul University, said people can be charged under both state and federal law.

“Timothy McVeigh was prosecuted both under Oklahoma law and federal law,” Tucker said. “The issue was that there was some concern that he would not get the death penalty, so he was charged with separate counts under Oklahoma law.”

Lippmann said there are parallels to the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City in 1993, for which four men were convicted on charges that included explosive destruction of property and assault on a federal officer.

“They were definitely acts of terror, but they were conventional crimes that were undertaken with the additional intent of intimidating the United States,” he said.

Agreement on a precise definition is hard to come by.

“Terror’s a weapon, and it’s used by a variety of actors,” said Thomas Mockaitis, a history professor at DePaul University and author of the book “The ‘New’ Terrorism: Myths and Reality.” “Criminals use terror. It’s a weapon used to spread fear. Governments use it, insurgencies use it and what I call extremists use it.”

In 2001, the USA PATRIOT Act defined domestic terrorism as “activities that involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any state; appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; to influence the policy of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.”

“[That definition is] useful to a point, but to some degree, a street gang in Chicago could engage in the same behavior, and it really isn’t a terrorist group,” Mockaitis said.

But Mockaitis said the federal government doesn’t use one particular definition.

“There are between nine and 15 [definitions], depending on the agency, and they tend to be so broad they become almost anything.”

The ACLU criticized the law’s definition in 2002, saying it was expanded to allow the federal government more investigatory leeway.

“The definition of domestic terrorism is broad enough to encompass the activities of several prominent activist campaigns and organizations,” the ACLU wrote on its website. “Greenpeace, Operation Rescue, Vieques Island and WTO protesters and the Environmental Liberation Front have all recently engaged in activities that could subject them to being investigated as engaging in domestic terrorism.”

One expert said the pursuit of political gain is a defining attribute of domestic terrorism.

“I think that most people would say that terrorists have a political philosophy,” said Charles E. Tucker Jr., executive director of the International Human Rights Law Institute at DePaul University.

Tucker said domestic terrorism has been a problem in the United States for at least a century. But he said the line has blurred between terrorism and organized crime.

“Once upon a time, we referred to these domestic folks as anarchists,” he said.

Mockaitis said the biggest domestic threats right now are hate groups, militias and individual actors. The FBI calls these individuals “lone offenders,” though Mockaitis said members of this category are more “sociopaths” than terrorists.

“In every society, you’ve got disgruntled people,” he said. “The question is who mobilizes them for what purpose?”

But 15 years after the Oklahoma City bombing, the most lethal act of terrorism in U.S. history until 9/11, experts say homegrown terrorism is not on the rise.

“I think it makes a nice headline or sound bite for a politician, but there’s just no clear evidence of any trend line here,” said Aziz Huq, a law professor at the University of Chicago.

Huq said the Fort Hood shootings could be better attributed to an individual psychological breakdown than to the perpetrator’s connections to a Yemeni cleric, for instance, distinguishing the shootings from an act of terror.

Charles E. Tucker, Jr., who is executive director of the International Human Rights Law Institute at DePaul University, said rates of domestic terrorism have either remained constant or even lowered.

“We’ve had organized crime in this country for years,” he said.

Like Huq, Tucker questioned the definition of domestic terrorism, citing mob violence and gang warfare as other crimes that could be included in this category.

“I’m unimpressed with the fact that we have a new group and we’ve put a different label on them,” he said.

The USA PATRIOT Act defines domestic terrorism as “activities that involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any state; appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; to influence the policy of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.”

According to the FBI, 345 of the 481 terrorist acts in the United States from 1980 to 2001 were domestic. There were 24 incidents of domestic terrorism from 2002 to 2005, after the foreign terrorist attack on 9/11.

The FBI recognizes different categories of domestic terrorists, including eco-terrorists, lone offenders and sovereign citizens.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security released a report last year warning that the election of the first African-American president, the potential for increased regulation of firearms and the poor economy could fuel rightwing extremist groups. The report, titled “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment,” drew comparisons to the rise in extremism in the 1990s under similar political and economic circumstances.

“To the extent that these factors persist, rightwing extremism is likely to grow in strength,” the department wrote in the report.

Tucker said one of the best strategies to combat this kind of terrorism is to show the perpetrators to the world.

“It’s hard to look at them and not see them for how ridiculous they are,” he said.

Timothy McVeigh, who was found guilty in the Oklahoma City bombing and executed in 2001, became “a tragic, comedic figure” for his perceptions of the government that led him to violence, Tucker said. He said he wondered if McVeigh would have blown up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building if he had known that would be his legacy.

“Would he have actually lit the fuse?” Tucker said.