There was no terror attack. Why is this the framing of the story?
I am sure the news would love to run information about the prosecution of foiled terrorists.
Could it perhaps be that terrorism is a vastly overhyped threat, and that effectively zero people are undertaking it?
The point is that a foiled plot doesn't get reported on when it's discovered only when the offender goes to trial.
There is no public record of each arrest by the police, as an example which might help understand this.
Furthermore there will be plots that are foiled, people arrested but prosecutions dropped due to lack of evidence or something and, again, the press offices in the police or government are not mandated to distribute that news.
That’s not to say the guys who agreed to said plots were blameless. That’s to say that I’ve seen zero evidence that the FBI has brought any actual, independently motivated terrorists to justice by foiling their plots.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_New_York_City_Subway_and_...
To be clear, “patsy” is too harsh a term for what I meant. There is value in diverting the attention of people intending to do harm from real plots to fake ones invented by the FBI. However, that is not “thwarting an attack”, and in my opinion does not justify excessive surveillance.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-51022706
But don't forget that places like GCHQ do not release information, so it would be very unusual to get "GCHQ helped identify these suspects". Here's one example where the GCHQ link was made clear (in news reporting), and it's pretty extreme.
Maybe there was no terror attack because the intelligence gathered from the hacked phones prevented it.
Less flippantly, here’s the buried follow-up:
> “WhatsApp killed the operation,” the official said. The terror suspect is still under traditional surveillance. But human resources are spread thin, the official said, especially around the winter holidays, which in Europe extend into early January and are a time when terrorists have staged attacks on the continent. “He’s not the only suspect we have to follow.”
This clearly indicates that the police have alternative means of tackling the issue. This means that privacy can be protected — at a cost. Note that no one mentions this in the article. The dichotomy presented is “snooping or TERRORISM”, not “snooping or increased resources for police to track their terror suspects”.