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Notes -
I wonder if maybe the national response to Timothy McVeigh's bombing actually made it significantly harder to build an IED in the US. I wouldn't know though, I don't know much about weapons.
Yes, though it's less about weapons than regulation affecting coordination.
Timothy McVeigh's truck bomb was made with large amounts of agricultural fertilizer, diesel fuel, and other elements, many of which would normally be seen together. It also occurred in 1995, where the internet was reaching a point to facilitate cross-country and cross-agency coordination, which is how an 'untraceable' purchase- the anomalous cash purchase of his vehicle- became the investigation's cue that he was a primary suspect (as opposed to someone whose vehicle might have been stolen for the plot).
This applies to other examples and cases, including drug processing. As a result, it's a pretty common practice internationally that stores that carry regulated materials of interest (ie truck bomb or illegal drug precursor inputs) have to maintain and report transactions of even legal/unrestricted items at certain thresholds. When certain thresholds or combinations are met- say you start buying tons of agricultural fertilizer when you aren't in the business of farming- then a system flag registers and later a regulator and/or investigator comes to ask a few questions, possibly with a warrant if you aren't feeling cooperative.
What this means for terrorism is that would-be terrorists have to resort to less and less capable alternatives to avoid automated detection thresholds, as the things more capable are also more regulated and easier to detect. Hence our fireworks car bomb rather than a fertilizer car bomb, or Britain facing knife-attacks rather than gun attacks. But these alternatives are less regulated precisely because they are less dangerous, and you get to a point where even actual IEDs- like to pressure cooker bombs used in the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013 kill fewer people (3) than just driving a vehicle into a crowd.
This is a similar effect from the role of domestic surveillance technologies used to limit the ability of terrorist cells, and leading to lone wolf terrorism.
If you can monitor mass communications, you can pick up the coordination messaging between group members.
If group members can't coordinate, either they find more secure forms of communication- losing the benefits of the higher-tech comms (such as coordination over distances, access to experts/advisors)- or they decrease the number of members in a group (fewer members = fewer potential comms).
Since the lowest number of members is 1- who by definition has no need to actively coordinate with anyone else- this makes that person very hard to detect in the coordination phase. Typically reports of found would-be lone wolfs either find them in the radicalization phase (where you watch whose talking with radicalizers), or in the preparation phase (where they get caught due to poor tradecraft due to not having the coordination with advisors on what to do and how).
Start stacking these effects together, and gradually you go from 'a group of middle eastern terrorists coordinating how to hijack a series of airplanes simultaneously' to 'guy rents truck.'
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