Paris Attacks Plot Was Hatched in Plain Sight
wsj.com
wsj.com
I'm so appalled by this article. Our government voted absurd laws allowing law enforcement to sniff all Internet traffic in France (and beyond). They did this while taking advantage of post-January ruckus. Yet they cannot stop terrorists using their real id. On top of that, I read that policemen were aware of an imminent terrorist attack on 11/13 (but I've not yet confirmed this with reliable sources).
What can we do when nobody gives a damn about their freedom? Most acquaintances I hit up with this topic just don't care "as long as I'm safe". We're rolling down a dangerous hill which will lead to the defeat of our freedom and the victory of terrorists.
Pardon my French.
There are quite a few definitions of freedom that actually require that (to a certain degree), even on wikipedia.
As in the theory of justice, there are two broad views on freedom: one side seeing freedom as something abstract (by law you are free to vote; the constitution does not discriminate against skin color, gender etc.) and the other side sees freedom as the concrete opportunity space of an individual (therefore studying should be free of cost, access to healthcare should be free etc.).
Interestingly, the abstract interpretation seems to match the common meaning in the U.S. and the concrete meaning of the word is more common in Europe. That seems to explain quite a few misunderstandings in spaces like HN :)
I can really recommend Amarty Sen's book 'The idea of justice' as a quite approachable introduction into the topic.
We are born on earth and we are entitled to a little piece of it. Powerful people shouldn't get to own everything.
> Some abolitionists in the United States regarded the analogy as spurious. They believed that wage workers were "neither wronged nor oppressed". Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans argued that the condition of wage workers was different from slavery, as laborers were likely to have the opportunity to work for themselves in the future, achieving self-employment. The abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass initially declared, "now I am my own master", upon taking a paying job. But later in life, he concluded to the contrary, "experience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other". Douglass went on to speak about these conditions as arising from the unequal bargaining power between the ownership/capitalist class and the non-ownership/laborer class within a compulsory monetary market. "No more crafty and effective devise for defrauding the southern laborers could be adopted than the one that substitutes orders upon shopkeepers for currency in payment of wages. It has the merit of a show of honesty, while it puts the laborer completely at the mercy of the land-owner and the shopkeeper.".
Why what virtue are you worthy of such freedom and by what vice should someone else be required to provide for you? Or do you not realize that you require a worse oppression for someone else... that they should spend much of their life sold to someone else and for their own benefit.
I think by terrorists here, you mean the oligarchs within the regime who are either complicit by standing down or plotting outright against the citizenry or completely incompetent by not catching criminals before they wreck havoc, and not those scruffy bearded nutjobs in the desert?
The 'incompetence theories' are getting thinner by day. Analog to this is the "Muslim" terrorist du jour group's 'oil production' in plain sight of God knows how many intelligence platforms are in use in air and space over the area.
Possible that they don't want to stop these attacks?
Possible that they actually create these events?
Is is possible? Or is the narrative that the Western civilization managed to get to their pinnacle of achievement in spite of being governed and guided by "incompetent" leaders, systems, and institutions?
Source? Any proof at all that they aren't just incompetent? Its not a stretch to believe gov agencies are just incompetent, considering how useless they are in general when it comes to technology.
There is a very real distinction to be made between people who require proof for belief and those who don't. In this case, people believe that their security is proportional the the privacy they give up. That unfounded assertion, tacit in all conversations on this (even tacit in liberal conversations about it), needs to be clearly labelled as wrong and evil, and those who willfully promulgate it (like virtually all politicians in the US and Europe) need to be told: you are saying something that is wrong and evil, as bad as anything Hitler asserted about race and national power.
This isn't a joke, or a goof, or a HN thread thing. This is a very real, globe-spanning conflict that will define this Age. Governments by their control of violence can do anything they want, it is up to the people to ensure it's self-restraint--and if it stops restraining itself, it is the people's right to replace that government entirely. We are now transitioning from a government hiding behind secrecy and Byzantine legal structures to government boldly asserting it's right to know everything about everyone within it's borders. It was always going to be about security. And it was always a lie.
The actual conspiracy is just a group of incompetents getting together to make a quick buck from the ambitious or the afraid. But just like the patent medicines sold by their 19th century counterparts, "Doesn't work" and "Doesn't hurt" aren't the same thing.
Actually creating a all-knowing, all-powerful security state would require resources and competence well beyond the capabilities of present-day western governments, but in trying they can leave devastation in their wake as the dangerous mistakes they make enable new and interesting kinds of abuse, crime, and fear.
There is another possibility: the hubris of the geeks-cum-heroes at the NSA. They have a science-fictional desire to do the Batman surveillance trick (from Dark Knight Rises? I forget) and Save Us All From the Bad Guy. That's dumb, because Bad Guys statistically arise equally inside and outside government. Literally every programmer at the NSA should quit and go make a cool video game or something.
Unfortunately, it is not comforting at all because we are not talking about one coherent group holding all the strings behind the scenes. No, there are many cabals fighting in the "shadow" government for domination and power and since they're above the law in theory and practice, it's really a scary scenario for all of us.
It's at times like this that I am ashamed of being French but then I realize that it would be the same in any other country and I become ashamed at the irrationality of my fellow human beings.
And Germany doesn't have a very good track record when it comes to spying on it's own citizens despite having a substantial percentage of the population who had experience with the Stasi. But you're right that at least things seem to be getting better in Germany.
Censorship of Islamist propaganda is needed when we have 1500 terrorists citizen in Syria and Iraq.
Censorship doesn't work. It just drives the discourse underground and often enough makes it even more attractive. The only way for censorship to work is to take it to at least the same extremes as China and have a system of delation in place to denounce people guilty of forbidden speech.
I, for one, am not ready to sacrifice my freedom like this for an hypothetical increase in security.
Also if it was so ineffective than the lose of privacy would also be as ineffective. After all we fear the lose of privacy because we believe that the government, or the business could act upon the data they gather about us.
You also need to realize that people that were doing unpleasant surveillance in parked cars, at night, trying to figure out what a known arms dealer was up to, are now enjoying the comfort of a desk, looking at a database of intercepted SMSes that don't make any sense, and waiting for the shift to end.
There is also another case which is finding out who did it - and in recent reports of police investigations there is always about use of surveillance cameras. The surety of being caught is also important in prevention. Maybe less in the case of suicide terrorists - but they are really a minority of all crime.
I have the feeling that people are so much against surveillance that they cannot stand any analysis of the arguments used. This is counterproductive.
Have you watched the news these last few days? Known extremists managed to get AK-47s and explosives in the middle of Paris, at the highest alert level of a military-on-the-streets Vigipirate program, while the borders were closed and the city's security was further elevated for an upcoming international meeting about climate.
They were known to law enforcement, they communicated over cleartext intercepted channels, they lost themselves in the noise of tens of millions of people joyfully filling some Stasi's storage units with their private conversations.
And all this less than a year since a similar event lead to the incompetents asking for even more data that they can stash for after the fact investigations. So there's a valid use: finding out, in retrospect, exactly how they failed to do their jobs. And maybe ask for even more funding, even more privacy invasions, even more power.
> Let's look at some numbers. We'll be optimistic -- we'll assume the system has a one in 100 false-positive rate (99 percent accurate), and a one in 1,000 false-negative rate (99.9 percent accurate). Assume 1 trillion possible indicators to sift through: that's about 10 events -- e-mails, phone calls, purchases, web destinations, whatever -- per person in the United States per day. Also assume that 10 of them are actually terrorists plotting.
This unrealistically accurate system will generate 1 billion false alarms for every real terrorist plot it uncovers. Every day of every year, the police will have to investigate 27 million potential plots in order to find the one real terrorist plot per month. Raise that false-positive accuracy to an absurd 99.9999 percent and you're still chasing 2,750 false alarms per day -- but that will inevitably raise your false negatives, and you're going to miss some of those 10 real plots.
This isn't anything new. In statistics, it's called the "base rate fallacy," and it applies in other domains as well. For example, even highly accurate medical tests are useless as diagnostic tools if the incidence of the disease is rare in the general population. Terrorist attacks are also rare, any "test" is going to result in an endless stream of false alarms.
This is exactly the sort of thing we saw with the NSA's eavesdropping program: the New York Times reported that the computers spat out thousands of tips per month. Every one of them turned out to be a false alarm.
And the cost was enormous -- not just for the FBI agents running around chasing dead-end leads instead of doing things that might actually make us safer, but also the cost in civil liberties. The fundamental freedoms that make our country the envy of the world are valuable, and not something that we should throw away lightly.
https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2005/03/why_data_mi...
And if you're trying to prevent atrocities, you'll convict them before they've done anything wrong.
Moxie Marlinspike wrote a great blogpost 2 years ago titled "Why we should all have something to hide". [0]
I suggest that you read it so that you have some ammunition against those who are uninformed about why their privacy matters so much in the future.
[0] http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/we-should-all-have-somethin...
Don't you see that most of the laws they voted are just the transposition from what where done in the real world to the internet ? For example hidden microphone in a suspect home applied to the internet is a spyware.
Unconfirmed report didn't that said that policemen but the CIA equivalent the DGSE listened a conversation where a woman said she wanted to be a martyr. A meeting was scheduled with the FBI equivalent the DGSI but too late. This is undeniably a failure and the services should be quicker and more cooperative between them. But we don't know if they listen to the same threats every days, when there is 11000 extremist Muslims for 5000 secret agent and less than 10000 in both services.
Except when you're linked to an investigation, you don't have to proove you're innocent of any crime. Still, all those laws seems to think the opposite : police will have access to all your data like if you were convicted. Guilty until prooven innocent.
Beside, it's not like governments never abuse this kind of info.
I am not advocating anything.
> Likewise, Mr. Abaaoud exploited Europe’s porous border system,[...]
> [...]where he and another man took a ferry to Patras, Greece, Italian officials said. “We are talking about citizens with regular European passports and with the right to travel freely,”[...]
I guess they're trying to explain us that Europeans have too much freedom ... better take it from them, for the children you know.
> Rental companies in Belgium don’t vet clients as long as their driver’s license, government identification and credit cards are valid.
Of course every rental company should ask their customers if they plan to commit a terrorist act before renting a car ... lying will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law !
> [...]Appart’City hotel, where clients have access to a secondary stairwell that leads directly to a parking lot without ever passing the front desk. The two-star hotel doesn’t require guests to register their cars to use the parking lot. Nor does it have security cameras.
A pity, with cameras and registration they surely could have thwarted the attacks (do I really need to put a sarcasm tag here ?).
This is not journalism, it's pushing a political agenda and a shitty one at that. You don't need to watch all EU citizen to prevent terrorism.
By the way, I'm French but I refuse to be guided by fear.
For your US example to work you'd need terrorists to travel from Mexico through a poor and overworked US border town.
Well given its current owner, not all that shocking even if he insists they maintain independent editorial integrity.
How can we take the powers above seriously when they can't even catch a fairly large network of terrorists scheming over the clearnet?
This is a lesson in the ineffectiveness and incompetence of the spying apparatus of the free world.
We've given up so much already for no benefit, and whenever they fail it's never because they were bad at their job, they just didn't have enough power or money to do their job.
What isn't discussed here is the numerous times that these institutions have actually created terrorists. Or lead people to a course of action of their choosing.
Moreover, you do not do a very good job of preventing terrorism by keeping secret all the times terrorism fails and publicly over-reacting every time it does.
But to broadly call spying apparatus ineffective and incompetent weakens your argument.
There have been dozens of publicly disclosed terror plots interrupted against the USA alone, surely many more we will never know about.(1)
There is a clear underlying reason for survellience - it works.
The complexity in the discussion is that it clearly doesn't work 100% of the time and comes at a significant cost
But this isn't a black and white issue, we are in the grey.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsuccessful_terrori...
Many of these terror plots are orchestrated by the FBI. Source: https://theintercept.com/2015/03/16/howthefbicreatedaterrori...
It works, but not (just) for terrorism prevention. It also works great for other things, such as preventing political ideologies you don't like from spreading. Or just in general as a power play over citizens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:List_of_unsuccessful_terr...
Earlier this year, I read The Looming Towers, an overview of various historical factors that led to the 9/11 attacks. Its focus is really more on the origins on Islamic extremism, not logistical planning of the 9/11 attacks, but it did cover several aspects of 9/11 specifically that were very interesting. Importantly, the FBI and CIA - between them - had enough information to stop the attacks but did not collaborate well enough, mostly due to the differing goals between the CIA and the FBI. To the CIA, a potential terrorist is an asset - they hope that person, if left on the street, will attempt to contact someone higher up in (say) al Qaeda and therefore generate more data for the agency. To the FBI, such a person is a suspect, and really needs to be taken off the street as soon as enough evidence has been gathered to build a criminal case against him. During the summer of 2001, the FBI was blocked form getting the full CIA info on several important 9/11 figures because the CIA knew they'd be immediately arrested with that information.
(that is, of course, a broad overview, but the main point is more or less correct)
It's frustrating to see so many people embracing their lack of freedom as a security blanket. We don't need to use terror to grant our governments more control over our lives, we need just need to hold those who claim to be keeping us safe accountable.
Terrorism is bullshit. Sadly, we can't do the right thing because the country is full of cowardly morons who think that the solution is toppling more governments, killing more people, and hoping that somehow this time will be different.
The transparency report I'd love to see, which I doubt will ever be released, is the number of stings which end up being LEOs on both sides, in which e.g. one handler is hoping to sting a weapons dealer and the other is hoping to sting a weapons buyer.
That would be a great Pink Panther sketch/scene :)
The failing of the french spying agencies is one of scale, they didn't scale to the exponential progression of jihadist x100 in few years.
I wonder what is stopping people from seeing it this way?
There's only one way to counter it: you have to change the culture of a nation, which ultimately determines its politics.
300,000 people will die in car accidents over ten years in the US. In a typical ten year span, maybe 0.5% as many will die from terrorism in the US (and really, only 9/11 skews that, otherwise it'd be so small as to be completely irrelevant). It shouldn't take anything more than that simple comparison to get people to understand the context. But then you throw in: propaganda of random sudden death by a foreign attacker, a foreign culture, or the idea of massive scale death from wmd - then you get wild, irrational panic among the vast majority of any people anywhere on earth.
I'd argue we should all be willing to accept an extremely small risk of terrorism death, in exchange for a proper vast amount of liberty. It's a trivial compromise, if a person is not a coward and prefers to live free. There was a time the general population agreed, but that was long ago now. Today, what I just said is more often considered very offensive, politically incorrect, and will be shouted down nearly anywhere it is proposed.
It's clear you often can't stop a terrorist from killing a room full of people. Governments around the world accumulate more power by pandering and pretending you can. If a terrorist is willing to die for it, there is nothing that can stop most small scale attacks. The best a nation can do, is try to limit that, act on intelligence if there is any, and try to prevent large terrorism attacks. That reality however, doesn't win votes, and very few politicians would ever dare tell that truth.
The population wouldn't be nearly so afraid of terrorism, if they weren't being constantly told to be, and or intentionally terrified by the propaganda. The risks were just as high in the 1970s and 1980s, and people were not nearly as terrified.
I'm not completely disagreeing with you, I know that the probability of dying in a terror attack is small.
But I have a Muslim colleague that went to Mecca last year. He came back transformed, not smiling anymore, refusing to shake hands with female colleagues and has been surprised praying in the toilets and in a bus (he's a bus driver) and made a big scandal about having to take of his woolly hat (which apparently he attached religious significance to).
So now I wonder if one morning he'll decide to come at work with an AK-47. And living in France, I'm sure you would agree it's not irrational to think that.
You can't apply reason and logic to his going to Mecca, and arrive at a conclusion that he may come in to work with an AK-47.
I don't find it irrational to be scared of someone that shows signs of radicalization.
That is exactly the "wildly irrational [propaganda that is] being pushed 24/7 by the most powerful and richest entities on earth" 'adventured was talking about. Sadly, this kind of association is so present in our culture now that we need to work hard to stop thinking like that.
> And living in France, I'm sure you would agree it's not irrational to think that.
France is big and - like every country - mostly uninteresting to terrorists. Do you live in Paris?
Seriously, are you uninformed or trolling ? The French wikipedia page [0] (sorry it's not as detailed in English) lists 8 terrorists attacks (3 failed attempts) for the year 2015. I don't want to become an interesting target !
> Do you live in Paris?
I don't and Hervé Cornara[1] didn't either.
So I'm not cowering in fear, ready to accept "fortress Europe" [2] however I'm legitimately (or so I think) worried.
[0] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorisme_en_France#2015
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint-Quentin-Fallavier_attack
Uninformed. Thanks for the links, I didn't realize there were more than 2 attacks in France this year.
English Wikipedia has a nicely formatted list[0].
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_France#List_of_si...
I just realized something else that was left out of the article. The terrorists were probably buying food too. You know those grocery stores don't vet their customers other than requiring payment. Scary, right?
I don't normally wear my tinfoil hat in public, but it's hard to see this article as anything but an attempt to sway public opinion on encryption and monitoring laws.
Tracking license plates + who is renting hotel rooms is common place in many parts of the world and is less intrusive than reading everyones email.
After writing that, I realized your "tracking license plates" may have referred to automated plate scanners. I think it would still be too easy to fake or mislead that, and it's going to cost a lot to deploy everywhere. After they are in every conceivable public location, another attack will happen and somebody will write, "if we had just known X car was in Y private house's garage..." and now we have to put surveillance equipment in every home, or concede that we're founded on ideas that preclude surveillance that intrusive and there will be times when that prevents law enforcement or national security.
Not saying that data would have helped identify that an operation was in progress but it's data that exists that isn't being recorded. Meanwhile they want access to our metadata and more.
Further infos, in french, here: http://www.canalplus.fr/c-emissions/c-le-petit-journal/pid65... [VIDEO]
As things stand, the French and the EU in general have been quite critical of Israel's attempts to fight Islamic terror.
If the "Do Not Fly" list is a good idea, it probably makes sense to apply it to car rentals if they don't already.
It isn't.
Anything less is simply amateur hour counter-terrorism technique, and a massive civil liberties violation to boot.
Terrorists will find a way to terrorize if they want to. The world is so chaotic and leaky that you can't stop people from doing stuff like this.
Let's not forget that not so long ago, terrorists were doing attacks with public vehicles.
They have time to plan and prepare, so they'll always chose a cost-effective way. Block one, and they'll pick another.
The questioned is how to prevent young ethnic men from becoming dissatisfied and and radicalized.
Like staunch commented, if someone is on a no fly list, flag car rentals, room reservations, etc too.