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There are more homegrown jihadists than the feds can actually watch. And not everyone likes what the FBI is doing instead.<\/strong><\/p>\n A day after Omar Mateen killed 49 and wounded 53 in an Orlando nightclub, purportedly under the banner of the Islamic State or other terrorist groups, the FBI announced that it had repeatedly scrutinized the shooter in recent years. As shocking as that news might have appeared, it fits a disturbing pattern: Many of the so-called \u201clone wolves\u201d who have carried out terror attacks in the United States have been previously known by the FBI. Among others, the FBI had investigated Tamerlan Tsarnaev years before the Boston Marathon bombings, Nidal Hasan before he opened fire at Fort Hood and Carlos Bledsoe before he opened fire on a Little Rock military recruiting station in 2009.<\/p>\n Particularly in the wake of the Edward Snowden scandals, we tend to think of the FBI and the sprawling homeland security apparatus as a giant surveillance machine\u2014an all-seeing government eye reading emails, tapping phones, tracking purchases and sitting in vans outside homes as undercover agents infiltrate terror cells. But the circumstances behind the Orlando shooting, counterterrorism experts say, underscore the very different reality: The FBI actually isn\u2019t big enough <\/i>to tackle the new era of online radicalization and independent-acting lone wolves. <\/b>It\u2019s not that the FBI didn\u2019t recognize Mateen as a threat; it\u2019s that <\/b>there are too many people like Mateen and Tsarnaev and Hasan across America today for the FBI to track them all\u2014leaving the vast majority of people who the FBI suspects might harbor terrorist aspirations to go about their daily lives without any regular government surveillance. Experts say it\u2019s a big problem\u2014one that\u2019s been brewing for more than two years as the Bureau has struggled to keep up with a wave of aspirational homegrown jihadists, who act faster and leave fewer clues than would-be terrorists a decade or two ago.<\/p>\n The Bureau has repeatedly said over the last six months that it has had more than 1,000 active probes related to the Islamic State. But, of these 1,000 or so suspected terrorists, the FBI only has the resources to thoroughly monitor a select few. The precise number of round-the-clock FBI surveillance teams is classified\u2014and additional teams can be readied in an emergency\u2014but sources familiar with Bureau resources say that the number is \u201cshockingly\u201d low, only in the dozens. At one point last year, sources reported<\/a> that the Bureau was watching 48 people intensely, a number that is towards the upper limit of the FBI\u2019s regular surveillance resources.<\/p>\n\u00a0And the resource crunch\u2014as well as the obvious risk of being wrong about leaving someone like Mateen on the streets\u2014has been pushing the Bureau to expand use of its controversial undercover terror stings, which help speed up the road to radicalization, but which also raise deep concerns among civil liberty advocates that the FBI is engaging in entrapment.<\/div>\n