Yeah but was it to the same extent? People are regularly posting guillotines these days and our economic outlooks for much of the world, and especially the US, is not all roses and sunshine.

It's because they have finally found the perfect trojan horse—"think of the children!"—in a time when people are too busy entertaining themselves to death.

This is their best chance for them to enact mass surveillance, before the hoi polloi crack and finally get out of their couches.

The urgency comes from having the actual war on the East side of the EU and whatever the hell is happening down South with refugees and what not. Then in the EU proper -- sabotage acts, ammunition dumps being blown up, cabels cut and drones flying above the military bases hosting nuclear fucking warheads, Chinese and r===an spyies in the parliament, armed nazis in the military, etc, etc.

The shit has hit the fan about a decade ago already and not calming down at all, but intelligence gathering capability of secret services of all EU countries are being continiously degraded, because everything is E2E by default and money flows are obscured too.

Nobody likes to see shit being on fire and having all the dashboards down.

Another happening happens, the services are asked why they didn't prevent it or report it being likely -- what do they answer? "We can't read the damn messages, so we can't know if there is a cell that plans to do it again".

It's the establishment putting measures in place to entrench their position with an uncertain future coming towards us, fast. They are setting up systems to prevent revolution.