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Comment by efuquen | Hacker News Reader

If that's so then why has there not been aa "Large Terror Attack" in the US since 9/11? Pulling off another such successful attack has been a stated major goal of Al Queda and not ISIS. Clearly something is preventing it and making it more difficult then doing it in Europe, which have suffered several attacks, with what happened in Paris being the most severe.

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Half of the reason has been the incompetence of the terrorists. There have been a number of failed attacks in the US in the last few years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsuccessful_terrorist...

Terrorists are by and large muppets, they operate on inadequate budgets, they plan badly, they execute inconsistently.

The only reason they succeed is becomes on infrequent occasions law enforcement is even more incompetent.

The 9/11 attacks had many, many red flag warnings before they went down that were largely ignored. What's so unusual about people training to fly planes, but not take off or land, right?

The same patterns will be found here in hindsight.

Deep, pervasive surveillance will only flood already saturated information channels. What they need is less information of a higher quality, not more noise in the system.

It's important to recognize that they also wanted to attack the US for at least a decade PRIOR to 9/11. So what was preventing them from doing it then?

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