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Social media has allowed groups, such as ISIL, to use the Internet to spot and assess potential recruits. With the widespread horizontal distribution of social media, terrorists can identify vulnerable individuals of all ages in the United States - spot, assess, recruit, and radicalize - either to travel or to conduct a homeland attack.

Some of the people involved in ISIS are going to Iraq, and some of our young people are being radicalised through the Internet.

It's one thing for someone to travel over to Syria and Iraq and come back. But, boy, it's a lot easier if they activate someone who's already here.

ISIL are already using the Internet for hideous propaganda purposes - for radicalisation, for operational planning, too.

ISIL particularly is very slick, very sophisticated, proselytizing and recruiting, and they are very astute users of social media.

Law enforcement has seen an unprecedented use of social media by ISIL. They're just kind of flooding the airwaves.

Given its Internet sophistication and the attraction the group has with vast numbers of potential recruits from among disaffected populations around the globe, ISIS has the realistic potential to eventually swell its ranks of jihadists waging a 'holy war' to hundreds of thousands in both the western and eastern hemispheres.

ISIL, AQ, now have the ability to literally reach into our homeland through social media, through the Internet, to recruit and inspire. It makes for a more complicated homeland security environment. And so it requires a whole of government approach, not just military and law enforcement, homeland security, aviation security, and the like.

ISIL's widespread reach through the Internet and social media is most concerning, as the group has proven dangerously competent at employing such tools for its nefarious strategy. ISIL uses high-quality, traditional media platforms as well as widespread social media campaigns to propagate its extremist ideology.

There's a conspiracy going on online every day between these top U.K. individuals within ISIS leadership out of Syria.