Paris Shootings and Explosions Kill Over 100, Police Say

This is scary. This was a well coordinated attack that usually create a lot of chatter before hand. Unlike lone wolf attacks these are somewhat easier to detect.

The French intelligence and counter terrorism units are either not doing their best or these terrorist are getting much better at covering their tracks.

They probably have more data than what they can process. The best they can do so far, in terms of prevention, is stopping the incredibly dumb: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/11/france-says-tou...

They knew something was up they just didn't know what.

http://sofrep.com/44480/french-and-german-police-knew-paris-...

How much "chatter" do you really need to coordinate something like this?

If it is a small group of just half a dozen people you should be pretty much invisible if you act a bit clever. Coordination can be done via throw away sim cards and personal meetings so you don't really need to communicate that much.

> This was a well coordinated attack that should have been picked up.

Should have been picked up?

You think secret services are omnipotent? That they can get a whiff of every conspiracy.

>The French intelligence and counter terrorism units are either dangerously incompetent or these terrorist are getting much better at covering their tracks.

Or, there is way, way more of them. Currently, thousands of migrants are entering Germany each day. No one is checking them, fingerprinting them, taking their photos or running those against databases.

You can find useful idiots decrying such treatment: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/refugee-crisi...

Doing so would require a lot of coercion, so no one is doing that.

My guess is that the Daeshi idiots slipped in a martyr cell or two. These guys got weapons from black market and executed a well-planned attack.

Why do people always mention migrants? There has been well known extremist cells in France, composed of french nationals or resident (1995 terror attack, Toulouse shootings, Charlie Hebdo shootings). Please stop mixing those.

That is always what they say "we detected a of chatter so we know it was group <X>" after something like this. Perhaps the terrorists have learned not to chat/call/write as much before the act?

Getting guns, grenades, creating bombs: These things take time, effort and "chatter".

The weakness of security states is that to "win" the police need a 100% capture rate. The terrorists only have to be successful once.

That depends on how you measure success. Some would say that just avoiding one is a success.

> Coordination can be done via throw away sim cards and personal meetings so you don't really need to communicate that much.

You forget the fact that the communication channel is always being monitored, but in this sad case, nothing was caught. Someone has already smuggled the weapons in before hand, just like how the bomb was able to made it to the plane early this month. Someone must have been tipped and bought the weapons from possibly local gangs and bam...

No, it's much simpler: in an open society it is virtually impossible to defend against terrorism. In other words, you can't stop these things, even if you really want to once they are in the planning stage. The chances of foiling the attack or the attack being successful are about even. So the only way to get rid of these attacks is to either go for some kind of root-cause and to fix the problem before it can gain a foothold or to radically chance society.

I'd hope for the former but I fear it will be the latter.

Somehow the assumption always seems to be that terrorists are stupid. They're not stupid, they have seen some plots foiled so they adapt until they make it through the next time. Footsoldiers they can afford to lose, just like the drug trade can afford to lose shipments and mules. Getting guns and grenades is relatively easy in Europe, many ordinary criminal gangs much less well funded manage to get these. Making bombs is a bit more difficult but that's one of those things that you only really need one guy for and some basic tradecraft to get them into the hands of the people that will use them.

'Chatter' is a sign of stuff not working as expected, if terrorists are half as intelligent as I give them credit for they'll know to stay off the phone and off the internet. You'd have a bigger chance locating them by the absence of traffic than by traffic assuming they are not as dumb as we'd like them to be.

Incidentally, and violating my own rule, that's why I don't believe in the whole 'snooping makes us safer' rubbish. If anything it just increases the size of the haystack for a constant number of needles.

I don't think you have to assume terrorists are stupid, good OPSEC is hard.

Particularly re. phones / internet, it only takes one mistake to link a phone number used for nefarious activities with your identity.

(I would expect them to use phones, at least - they have to coordinate somehow.)

I don't think that's an effective attitude to take in response to events like this. The job of intelligence agencies is to minimize the risk of attacks like this, not to eliminate it. The more governments think they can actually eliminate the risk, the more we all suffer.