Gaps in France’s Surveillance Are Clear; Solutions Aren’t

For each complicated problem, there is a simple solution (usually proposed by a "conservative") who mind lives far in the distant past) which is totally lacking in understanding of the problem, and which, therefore, will fail miserably. The solution in this case is simple: Embrace the Chinese Communist/American Capitalist system of putting all power into a small all-powerful body of men who are accountable to no one and who will make and implement all solutions.

Lots of Monday morning quarterbacking here. Somebody made a decision. It was the wrong decision. If we hold every decision-marker accountable for every failure, in the end we'll get no decisions -- and that's not what we want.

Police must do everything right. And terrorists only need to do one thing right. We hand them the playbook on how we do surveillance every day. And then we are disappointed when they don't discuss their plans on cellphones, and we call it a 'gap'?

I prefer a country which respects human rights to one which provides 100% security. But then the U.S. doesn't even provide 100% security - see the Boston Marathon.

We can't blame the French intelligence for abandoning the surveillance on the Kouachi brothers, as previous monitoring of the two had not shown any sign of concern.
We human beings are highly unpredictable and our actions depend a lot on the interactions with other people.
Even if the French intelligence had not lost sight of the two brothers, it might not have been able to prevent a terrorist act, as it could have been carried out by somebody else, whom the authorities had overseen.

The solutions are complicated, and it's very easy to play Monday morning quarterback. The only way to make a dent is to evaluate root cause, risk of doing nothing, risk of acting when no problem was present, and the risk of acting with success - thwarting the bad guy.

After 911, and still to this day, we discuss profiling. The TSA won't profile because it's not politically correct. So my 80 year old mom is frisked just about everytime she goes to an airport. Profiling, while not politically correct, does increase your liklihood of acting with success and acting when no problem is present.

But then no one wants to talk about using statistics to put together a plan.

While France has been profiling and stalking and marginalizing and discriminating against 5.3 million French Muslims only a small handful have fallen for the ideology of these men. France recognizes and defines and criminalizes hate speech as anything said about Jews, Judaism Israel and the Holocaust while giving a pass to any similar commentary about Muslims, Islam, Arab nations or the Nakhba. There are only 500,000 French Jews.

France is the home of Alfred Dreyfus, Henri Petain, Vichy, Lyon and Klaus Barbie and LePen the father and daughter and the National Front.

Those mental defectives who are easily led to wage war for the superstition of fundamentalist religions are not the biggest threat to Democratic governments and their citizens, it is the coldly calculating individuals who use them.

The problems noted in this article are faced by intelligence and police services internationally. Short of a police state coupled with mass deportations and when considering the scope of the problem, resources will always be limited.

As an initial measure, it might be reasonable for EU (and US) politicians to break the "code of silence" surrounding Islamist terrorism. Instead of cloaking the problem in euphemisms, circumlocutions and ellipses, perhaps some candor might be refreshing. They could begin by following the example of France's Socialist (!) Prime Minister Manuel Valls. In a recent speech to the National Assembly he candidly discussed the “...war on terrorism, jihadism, and Islamist radicalism." Nicolas Sarkozy suggested several specifics. These include isolation of jailed Islamists to prevent proselytizing, revocation of French citizenship from binational jihadists and limiting civil rights of nationals involved with jihadist movements.

Candor and specific policies along the lines suggested by Sarkozy are practical. They should be reinforced by reminding the French public of the 1905 law, "la laïcité républicaine" (strict separation of church and state). In fact, that last idea is something that US politicians might remember and reinstitute: it was and is a pragmatic concept for dealing with religious differences and it was suggested by our own Founding Fathers.

The only thing I can think of is to not let them return. That solution depends on knowing they went, and on being able to prevent them from re-entering the country. Neither would be easy. But they'd perhaps be easier than trying to monitor them for life.

Allow me to ask a question:
Imagine if you will that you owned a building and had persons live there.

Say that sometime down the road a few of those persons up and decided to kill one of your tenants. What would you do?

What say a few of the other tenants claimed that they disagreed with the actions but they "understood" why and that it was basically your fault for the murders because you didn't make them feel welcome.

Say another one of your tenants murdered another one with other tenants saying the same again.

What do you do with your building and those tenants?

The idea that this country and others, allow people to travel to terrorist countries, and train to be just that, then return demonstrate their acquired skills is foolishness. If you travel to a known terrorist state, your passport should be revoked immediately. If you want to return to your country of origin, you'll need to explain where you've been for the last year. If it can be verified that you were visiting family, by all means, welcome home. If, on the other hand, you won't tell us where you've been, then you should stay there until we can check you out further.

No person is given an inalienable right to turn on his/her own country. For years, people could be trusted to tell the truth. In this day and age, NOBODY TELLS THE TRUTH, EVER. With that in mind, investigate thoroughly, every person returning from a terrorist country. It's easier there than after they have returned home and blended back into society.

No amount of surveillance or security can deter the one to strike who is not afraid to die. The Europe, especially France, has nurtured many such minority youths who think they have nothing more to lose. When one is repeatedly denied a job because of race, skin color or ethnicity, it is the humiliation more than a job that injures your self-respect and leaves a gaping hole in your pride and turns you into 'no body'. This humiliation drives the frustrated , alienated and angry youths to resort to violence. Europe has to address entrenched racism to achieve any results.

The article's title says that solutions aren't clear, but the end of the article makes the solution perfectly clear: simply transfer such cases to the judicial authorities, who can do more than just follow people and tap their phones (and presumably have adequate funding). So why aren't solutions clear?

The surveillance could have exposed the Charlie Hebdo plot in the early stages but the failed and as a result many people died. Just look how the Mossad and Shin Bet work tirelessly to protect Jewish people wherever they are threatened. Finally, The surveillance should stop allowing ex-fighters returning from Syria back into France, because these people have probably fought with ISIS.

The Atlantic has written a definitive article on what ISIS is up to, which should be mandatory reading for all who visit these pages, and, for that matter, the people who are managing this war.

http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/02/what-isis-really-wan...

The level of surveillance that it would take to find every single terrorist would be unacceptable to most people. In fact, it would be unacceptable in a "free" society which France is. What we are struggling with in every country is the appropriate level of surveillance versus one that is so intrusive that there is no privacy at all. So far we haven't been able to do that.

To quote Roberta Wohlstetter writing about Pearl Harbor: "It is much easier after the event to sort the relevant from the irrelevant signals. After the event, of course, a signal is always crystal clear; we can now see what disaster it was signaling since the disaster has occurred. But before the event it is obscure and pregnant with conflicting meanings."

We cannot lock up, follow and eavesdrop every phone call and chat muslims make. The bigger the haystack is, the more difficult it is to find the needle.

The French police made a judgement call based on the info they had then.

In spite of all these tragedies it is still much more likelier to die in a car crash, be killed by spouse or parent and so on. These are, what some people call, fair risks. Terrorism and nuclear accidents are unfair risks.

We are much better at dealing with fair risks.

Ridiculous that authorities now claim they lacked enough intelligence (well maybe that's true) to put the brothers on the no-fly list. As a criminal attorney I have helped many foreign nationals get off the no -fly list for simple non-violent, non-political crimes. Included in my list of those who easily made it onto the list is a pilot of a major international airline who suffered a conviction for shoplifting. If that was enough to put him on the list how did these punks escape scrutiny?

How many people did they stop following around who didn't subsequently do anything?

A number of paragraphs into this article there is a bare bones statement that one Mohammed Merah shot seven people in Toulouse in March 2012. I don't remember hearing anything about that at the time. Maybe because the people who were shot weren't journalists and weren't in Paris. And maybe that is as it should be.

People die all the time. Traffic accidents. Infections contracted in hospitals. Ebola. Starvation caused by drought. Being a civilian in the wrong place in a war zone.

We are allowing these "terrorists" to win when we devote inordinate time and energy to trying to identify them and forestall their plots. There are more efficient ways to save innocent lives.

The manual process of survillence of Islamic terrorists is too outdated and can not scale. Technology has to be brought in the process to aid the intelligent teams. The technology platforms with AI based analytics and cloud computing can help to integrate the different intelligence groups of the state on a holistic manner. France can not employ and train sufficient intelligence officers to monitor all the Islamists. Go for technology solution - there are many advances in connecting the dots and predicting the threats by using data mining. US NSA regularly use these techniques.

Let us give thanks to the Mossad and Shin Bet who work tirelessly to protect Jewish people wherever they are threatened.

As Woody Allen once said, prediction is ver difficult, particularly when it pertains to the future.

And when it involves human behavior, it is close to impossible.

The surveillance that could have exposed the Charlie Hebdo plot in the early stages is the sort of monitoring exposed by Edward Snowden, who is admired by millions. We can't have it both ways, and when we refuse to make tough choices, people will die.

I'm not sure why they allow fighters returning from Syria back into France. Aren't these people who have fought with ISIS? Or maybe I'm misunderstanding.