Made headline news in the U.S. today, along with: the three teenage girls who attempted to join ISIS (youngest was 15 I believe): and talking heads (supposed experts on terrorism) on numerous main stream news channels claiming that the U.S. is at a greater risk of a terrorist attack now than before we started bombing ISIS. Hopefully no one is surprised by the idea if you bomb somebody they want to attack you in return. In this case they desired, and continue to desire, to attack the U.S., but now they have with a greater sense of urgency, and in their mind justification to do so.
In the big scheme of things the numbers of those being self-radicalized in the U.S. are still relatively low compared to Western Europe. Nonetheless, it does present a high degree of uncertainty for security officials trying to track and prevent threats. Any dickweed, like the Canadian kid who committed homicide in the name of Allah, can pop up almost anywhere at anytime. 99% of the time their actions will be limited in scope as it relates to physical damage or harm to our citizens, but those actions will have disproportionate psychological effects beyond the physical effects of the attack. At least until this is accepted as part of a new normal. When it is, then the terrorists will come face to face with the Red Queen effect, and then they'll focus on another 9/11 scale attack (should assume they are anyway).
That begs the question, should we continue to reward the media for hyping these attacks to convince the extremists they're having an impact, or down play the attacks in the media to further motivate the terrorists to conduct larger scale attacks? Not sure it makes a difference one way or the other, some will always pursue larger scale attacks, but in theory, admittedly a weak theory, it could discourage others if they think they are achieving their ends with these pin prick attacks.
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