ISIS and many in that area of world do not like Western nations because they see as us both immoral and a threat to their beliefs. We then feel guilt and don't take action because of "fears" it will further the problem while totally ignoring the fact that sitting back and watching is merely allowing them to establish their foothold and carry out wholesale slaughter which in turn makes the victims of ISIS hate us for not helping.
As per a government official being cynical, look at it from the stand point of his job. He thinks he knows what he needs to do but finds most avenues blocked because the government tends to take an authority given to it and abuse it to no end.
As an American I know there is a price to freedom and I want my encryption and such because I don't trust all elements of my government. I want that illusion of freedom preserved. When terror once again comes to our shores how many won't?
Treating IS as a virulent unstoppable philosophy is giving it far too much credit, and throwing our rights out the window in their name is and will be one of our nation's great shames. It's absolutely fair to treat people who would do either of those things with the contempt and judgment they deserve
In history, one can find examples where an enemy shut down an economy by killing civilians, and that doing so is not very hard. Essentially a western economy cannot operate with a weekly terror attack, it would simply freeze (well, in practice that situation lead to a civil war, because a LOT of people get screwed because of the distrust these attacks generate, and to a lesser extent by the security measures). So nation states are extremely wary of these sorts of things.
In a way states respond strongly because people respond strongly. Because too few people are willing to carry out their jobs as normal when they get openly confronted with a 1/1 million chance they'll be gunned down.
In Western Europe, this is a lost fight. The problem, at one point, decades ago, was that islamic ideology does indeed push these sorts of attacks. Raids is what they called it 1500 years ago, but they're not all that different. Send out a small force whose sole intention is to kill everyone they find, who have at best a small chance of returning alive. So you can make a very hard to refute argument that this is indeed "islamic", and muslims are very sensitive to criticism that they're not religious enough. Criticism of muslim attacks was silenced in the muslim community itself. Then they replaced pretty much all teachers in a lot of schools. That's how it started. That's how violence preachers got into schools and mosques, into city hall and ... And yes, it is really organized from islamic religious infrastructure. Even that is not new. Did you know that a "prayer house" is "masjid" in arabic ? What does "mosque" mean ? It translates roughly to "fort". Mosques are not for prayer (though, like forts, they often have prayer spaces).
Right now these people in the "banlieues" in Paris, Bordeaux, Brussels, Rotterdam, ... are embedded into those locations and can only be dislodged by a war. They're also looking to start a war, to dislodge everyone else. They are pushing their own people into poverty, by constantly pushing notions of muslim superiority into the kids, then throwing them into the street. Society, not even their own limited society, doesn't agree with muslim superiority : they have no skills, they're aggressive because of this superiority shit (the hate preachers weekly "scandal" doesn't help either), and they have no respect for the law or local customs. So very few people hire them, and never into positions that would require them to be trusted. So in the real world, they are an underclass (exceptions exist of course).
That muslims who are taught constantly about their superiority are an underclass is according to them, of course not the result of not having any skills, and generally being aggressive morons that everybody moves away from. You see this is a vast conspiracy. Not one of the traditional western conspiracies, not a right wing conspiracy (although they're involved), not a left wing conspiracy (although they're involved), it's not the Jews (although they're REALLY involved), it's not whites (although ...), it's not the illuminati (although they're involved).
You see, it's a conspiracy of EVERYONE against their own little group directly.
The problem is that these are groups of a few hundred 15-35 year old muslims, and all they do is complain about it, maybe have a few kids, and generally hang out jobless in the street. They are useless, they have no prospects, they can't be trained and there's about to be millions more of them in half a decade or so.
A civil war in Western Europe is coming, it is a done deal. It is like a comet hitting the top of the atmosphere : not much damage yet, maybe it's even pretty. But the explosion is coming soon no matter what anybody does, and it'll be like nothing you've ever seen before. It is a matter of time, and nobody knows how much.
Which sort of takes for granted the idea that the government official's position -- which no one doubts precedes the attacks -- is not honestly held for the reasons presented, and that the official does not honestly believe that the attacks represent the kind of problem that adopting the policies he advocates would help prevent.
It doesn't seem to me that this style of argument serves much except to win kudos from people who already agree with the ideas behind it and oppose the policies being advocated.
I'd rather see some more introspection and a bit less clamoring for more budget and fewer restrictions from the intelligence community after this attack. And it is not as if this is the first spectacular failure of the intelligence services when it comes to actually preventing this sort of thing either (Which does not surprise me because I strongly believe that it is fundamentally impossible to protect an open society against these kinds of attacks without a substantial change of that society, after which we could probably no longer call it 'open').
Given France already possessed the desired legal capability and was warned by a friendly government about one of the suspects in 2014 and again in 2015...
I'm not sure how asking for the same measures that failed is a strategy of someone with genuine concerns. Why do you think that?
This certainly is a valid point, but here you're complaining that he took the wrong political action, not that he took a political action.
The most dumb thing one can do is repeating the same operation over and over again expecting a different outcome.
He just disagrees with you. (And me probably.)
That's my problem with what he's saying it is just 'more of the same' rather than a new course in reaction to what happened because there appears to be a bug in his system after some reflection.
His response is not one that has anything to do with what happened in Paris and why, this was his position last week and it is still his position this week, hence my use of the word 'cynical'. He's even trying to blame Snowden for the Paris attacks.
More of the same will definitely not get us out of this mess, it will likely only make it worse. Let's see him argue for more up close and personal contact with would-be terrorists, infiltration, covert operations and so on. But more dragnet surveillance seems to be a broken strategy, given the evidence available.
Also, I'm sure if it was brought up randomly, with no linkage to a current terrorist attack, you and others would be saying "There haven't been any terrorist attacks on (countrys) soil in X years, so whatever system we have now is working just fine"