There are other plausible reasons to consider why terrorism has lowered in Western Europe:
1) IRA is dismantled. IRA and UK are at peace.
2) ETA is dismantled as well. That's more recently though.
3) The Iron Curtain is down. Its a well known fact Eastern Europe states were supporting terrorists such as Carlos and the RAF. In the 80s this became less feasible already.
4) Right after the Iron Curtain went down there were wars and new countries (eventually) born. After that, the region more or less stabilized. NB: This is merely my perception.
The IRA were vastly more capable than the Islamic terrorists we face in the UK today, but they never had to face a security service as well equipped to deal with them.
Can you objectively prove this? Specifically that its due to 1) experience 2) advancement in tech?
Terrorists also gain experience. Terrorists also advance in tech.
You do realize terrorist plots were foiled in the 70s and 80s as well? Minimizing (casualties from) terrorism is of all times.
Yet the so-called 'vastly more capable' security services did not stop 9/11, Madrid, London attacks, Boston, or the attack on the USS Cole. All of that happened after mid 90s, arguably when mass surveillance was possible.
What your posts continue to lack is any kind of substance on the positive effect of mass surveillance.
The fact targeted surveillance is much older is a fallacy. However targeted surveillance has a proven track record. I've yet to see the efficiency of mass surveillance. I'll put my money on a lot of false positives, and a cat and mouse game where the mouse is going to adapt pretty quickly to the mass surveillance. In Belgium, for example, the government wants to have all SIM cards registered. All anonymous SIM cards will be disabled in a month. Hows that going to help catch terrorists? If not only for the fact anonymous SIM cards are still sold in the neighboring The Neherlands?
Finally, as I posted in the other post, we must remember the main goal of terrorism is not (merely) 'killing people' [1]. So the statistic isn't accurately describing the 'effectiveness of terrorism'.
[1] Specifically: "7. The direct victims are not the ultimate target (as in a classical assassination where victim and target coincide) but serve as message generators, more or less unwittingly helped by the news values of the mass media, to reach various audiences and conflict parties that identify either with the victims’ plight or the terrorists’ professed cause;"
By proves I don't mean the security services saying that they have saved you from numerous terror attacks per year (but all the details have to remain secret "because of security reasons").
Without proves your comment is pure right-winged surveillance propaganda.
The low, low price for this is our inching ever closer to police state status. No big deal, right.
"An operation run by GCHQ, the British intelligence and security organisation, used interception warrants to monitor phones owned by individuals linked to the 2015 plot, it was reported."
Whereas earlier you mentioned the panopticon.
Well, the above has very little to do with mass surveillance. If anything, that just muds the water. It has to do with targeted surveillance. Which has a proven track record.
I've yet to see the efficiency of mass surveillance in a direct relation to catching terrorism.
It is possible that the libertarians are right, that mass surveillance doesn't in of itself prevent acts of terror. There's considerable evidence there's a TMI problem. Just as with any form of education, too much information can prevent learning because prioritization gets shot.
What the libertarians don't address though is the possibility that mass surveillance may as a side affect hold back a higher order of terror.
The feeling of being watched changes people's behaviour, known to often make them self police. This applies to future terrorists becoming more passive also. Terrorism is a very tiny subset of human behaviours after all.
The supporters of mass surveillance don't want to make that argument because they rightly think it plays into the hands of the civil liberties people.
Against this is 'Culture' or the side affect wouldn't be as consequential. Post World War 1 German society, Islam today, different Mafias, they have in common a normalization of political violence. To get the full value you'd need to break the society down e.g. Denazification, anti-racketeering laws...
Either way, terrorism does contribute to bulk surveillance. And heck, it might even actually be helpful. You don't know because it's secret.
Your quote does not directly support mass surveillance. It might just as well be an argument for targeted surveillance. I got nothing against targeted surveillance (I'm a proponent for that).
It doesn't need to. I wanted to point out that mass surveillance is one of the costs of terrorism, regardless of its effectiveness in fighting it. And that we know little about its effectiveness because presumably there is lots of top secret stuff going on. Surely they don't want ISIS to know which channels are compromised and how, which means you can't know too.
Terrorists simply shift their attacks to the simplest form that still works and could not care less about those that get caught, they are the equivalent of probes to determine what works and what does not, they were expendable, whether they succeed or not is not relevant as long as some of them do succeed. The conclusion seems to be that low tech attacks carried out by a minimum number of people against soft targets have the highest chance to succeed.
Open societies are by definition incapable of stopping terrorist attacks in a direct way. Any idiot with a driving license (or even without) can be instructed in how to turn a lorry or even a regular car into a weapon.
The internet enables effective command and control and the media helpfully increase the apparent magnitude and effectiveness of an attack.
'vastly' indicates huge numbers, 'all of the people' indicates huge numbers as well. In reality those numbers are (1) really small and (2) do not account for those attacks where governments helped a little bit to get the ball rolling (or in fact did almost everything).
Keep in mind that terrorists, just like hackers only have to succeed once in a while, that in spite of using plain comms a substantial amount of these attacks succeed and that in an open society there is no effective way of stopping terrorists to begin with.
So if you really want to get to the point where each and every terrorist attack is stopped you are arguing for a police state because that would stop you from getting into your car and driving wherever you want to go as well. Otherwise what is there to stop you from driving into a bunch of pedestrians and claiming terrorism?
It's almost like they want attacks to continue happening for political gain
Not successfully following up could be a number of things though, it's pretty difficult to determine which it might have been when you can hardly trust what is printed in the newspapers or comes out of politicians mouths.