
Paris Attacks Plot Was Hatched in Plain Sight - frostmatthew
http://www.wsj.com/articles/paris-attacks-plot-was-hatched-in-plain-sight-1448587309
======
baku-fr
Parisian sysadmin here.

I'm so appalled by this article. Our government voted absurd laws allowing law
enforcement to sniff all Internet traffic in France (and beyond). They did
this while taking advantage of post-January ruckus. Yet they cannot stop
terrorists using their _real_ id. On top of that, I read that policemen were
aware of an imminent terrorist attack on 11/13 (but I've not yet confirmed
this with reliable sources).

What can we do when nobody gives a damn about their freedom? Most
acquaintances I hit up with this topic just don't care "as long as I'm safe".
We're rolling down a dangerous hill which will lead to the defeat of our
freedom _and_ the victory of terrorists.

Pardon my French.

~~~
eternalban
> ... Yet they cannot stop terrorists ..

The 'incompetence theories' are getting thinner by day. Analog to this is the
"Muslim" terrorist du jour group's 'oil production' in plain sight of God
knows how many intelligence platforms are in use in air and space over the
area.

Possible that they don't want to stop these attacks?

Possible that they actually create these events?

Is is possible? Or is the narrative that the Western civilization managed to
get to their pinnacle of achievement in spite of being governed and guided by
"incompetent" leaders, systems, and institutions?

~~~
soared
> getting thinner by day

Source? Any proof at all that they aren't just incompetent? Its not a stretch
to believe gov agencies are just incompetent, considering how useless they are
in general when it comes to technology.

------
jmnicolas
> [...]suggests the challenges in identifying would-be terrorists and
> preventing further attacks in the fluid, digital and transnational world of
> today, especially when they are European citizens.

> Likewise, Mr. Abaaoud exploited Europe’s porous border system,[...]

> [...]where he and another man took a ferry to Patras, Greece, Italian
> officials said. “We are talking about citizens with regular European
> passports and with the right to travel freely,”[...]

I guess they're trying to explain us that Europeans have too much freedom ...
better take it from them, for the children you know.

> Rental companies in Belgium don’t vet clients as long as their driver’s
> license, government identification and credit cards are valid.

Of course every rental company should ask their customers if they plan to
commit a terrorist act before renting a car ... lying will be prosecuted to
the full extent of the law !

> [...]Appart’City hotel, where clients have access to a secondary stairwell
> that leads directly to a parking lot without ever passing the front desk.
> The two-star hotel doesn’t require guests to register their cars to use the
> parking lot. Nor does it have security cameras.

A pity, with cameras and registration they surely could have thwarted the
attacks (do I really need to put a sarcasm tag here ?).

This is not journalism, it's pushing a political agenda and a shitty one at
that. You don't need to watch all EU citizen to prevent terrorism.

By the way, I'm French but I refuse to be guided by fear.

~~~
gsnedders
And coming from the WSJ I'm even more surprised: you can argue that the US has
a porous border system, given you can get a ferry from New Jersey to New York
City, talking about citizens with regular American passports and with the
right to travel freely.

~~~
DanBC
The problem is supposedly with people getting into Europe, via the poorly
resourced Greek islands, using false passports. Once they're in they can
travel across the Shengen area.

For your US example to work you'd need terrorists to travel from Mexico
through a poor and overworked US border town.

------
mgo
Yet this whole event is being used as a catalyst for further degradation of
freedom and encryption.

How can we take the powers above seriously when they can't even catch a fairly
large network of terrorists scheming over the clearnet?

This is a lesson in the ineffectiveness and incompetence of the spying
apparatus of the free world.

We've given up so much already for no benefit, and whenever they fail it's
never because they were bad at their job, they just didn't have enough power
or money to do their job.

~~~
aresant
You make a good top level point that I think most would agree with -
successful terror plots degrade our freedom because we fearfululy grant our
government more power.

But to broadly call spying apparatus ineffective and incompetent weakens your
argument.

There have been dozens of publicly disclosed terror plots interrupted against
the USA alone, surely many more we will never know about.(1)

There is a clear underlying reason for survellience - it works.

The complexity in the discussion is that it clearly doesn't work 100% of the
time and comes at a significant cost

But this isn't a black and white issue, we are in the grey.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsuccessful_terrori...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsuccessful_terrorist_plots_in_the_United_States_post-9/11)

~~~
sjm-lbm
The real complexity of the discussion comes from the unknown number of attacks
that would be prevented with very mild pre-9/11 security measures.

Earlier this year, I read _The Looming Towers_ , an overview of various
historical factors that led to the 9/11 attacks. Its focus is really more on
the origins on Islamic extremism, not logistical planning of the 9/11 attacks,
but it did cover several aspects of 9/11 specifically that were very
interesting. Importantly, the FBI and CIA - between them - had enough
information to stop the attacks but did not collaborate well enough, mostly
due to the differing goals between the CIA and the FBI. To the CIA, a
potential terrorist is an _asset_ \- they hope that person, if left on the
street, will attempt to contact someone higher up in (say) al Qaeda and
therefore generate more data for the agency. To the FBI, such a person is a
_suspect_ , and really needs to be taken off the street as soon as enough
evidence has been gathered to build a criminal case against him. During the
summer of 2001, the FBI was blocked form getting the full CIA info on several
important 9/11 figures because the CIA knew they'd be immediately arrested
with that information.

(that is, of course, a broad overview, but the main point is more or less
correct)

It's frustrating to see so many people embracing their lack of freedom as a
security blanket. We don't need to use terror to grant our governments more
control over our lives, we need just need to hold those who claim to be
keeping us safe accountable.

~~~
gotchange
The pre-9/11 CIA/FBI power play detailed in your comment was portrayed to some
degree in the 1998 movie "The Siege" by Denzel Washington. Any chance you've
seen it before?

~~~
sjm-lbm
I haven't, but I might give it a watch.

------
misiti3780
This was an intelligence community failure - and even though they clearly
failed to thwart the attacks, they are asking for more power. If this article
proves anything to me, it shows that these attacks are not preventable. So
giving up more freedom and supporting dragnet policies is obviously not going
to do anything, given they used their real names and public websites (as
opposed to encrypted communication).

I wonder what is stopping people from seeing it this way?

~~~
adventured
A generation or two of very calculated, expensive propaganda put toward
instilling immense amounts of fear among the general population - any moment
now, you could die of a terrorist attack. It's wildly irrational, and being
pushed 24/7 by the most powerful and richest entities on earth (huge central
governments), how do you counter that?

There's only one way to counter it: you have to change the culture of a
nation, which ultimately determines its politics.

300,000 people will die in car accidents over ten years in the US. In a
typical ten year span, maybe 0.5% as many will die from terrorism in the US
(and really, only 9/11 skews that, otherwise it'd be so small as to be
completely irrelevant). It shouldn't take anything more than that simple
comparison to get people to understand the context. But then you throw in:
propaganda of random sudden death by a foreign attacker, a foreign culture, or
the idea of massive scale death from wmd - then you get wild, irrational panic
among the vast majority of any people anywhere on earth.

I'd argue we should all be willing to accept an extremely small risk of
terrorism death, in exchange for a proper vast amount of liberty. It's a
trivial compromise, if a person is not a coward and prefers to live free.
There was a time the general population agreed, but that was long ago now.
Today, what I just said is more often considered very offensive, politically
incorrect, and will be shouted down nearly anywhere it is proposed.

It's clear you often can't stop a terrorist from killing a room full of
people. Governments around the world accumulate more power by pandering and
pretending you can. If a terrorist is willing to die for it, there is nothing
that can stop most small scale attacks. The best a nation can do, is try to
limit that, act on intelligence if there is any, and try to prevent large
terrorism attacks. That reality however, doesn't win votes, and very few
politicians would ever dare tell that truth.

The population wouldn't be nearly so afraid of terrorism, if they weren't
being constantly told to be, and or intentionally terrified by the propaganda.
The risks were just as high in the 1970s and 1980s, and people were not nearly
as terrified.

~~~
jmnicolas
> It's wildly irrational

I'm not completely disagreeing with you, I know that the probability of dying
in a terror attack is small.

But I have a Muslim colleague that went to Mecca last year. He came back
transformed, not smiling anymore, refusing to shake hands with female
colleagues and has been surprised praying in the toilets and in a bus (he's a
bus driver) and made a big scandal about having to take of his woolly hat
(which apparently he attached religious significance to).

So now I wonder if one morning he'll decide to come at work with an AK-47. And
living in France, I'm sure you would agree it's not irrational to think that.

~~~
fedora007
It is irrational because you're scared due to recent events. You're proving
OP's point.

You can't apply reason and logic to his going to Mecca, and arrive at a
conclusion that he may come in to work with an AK-47.

~~~
jmnicolas
It would be irrational to be scared of him just because he's a Muslim. For the
record I have several other Muslim colleagues that are absolutely not worrying
me.

I don't find it irrational to be scared of someone that shows signs of
radicalization.

------
shanemhansen
It's amazing how you well WSJ has spun everyday things. Of course car
companies only care about your license and ability to pay? What the else
should they be checking? Apparently it's also terrible that the terrorists
stayed in a hotel.

I just realized something else that was left out of the article. The
terrorists were probably buying food too. You know those grocery stores don't
vet their customers other than requiring payment. Scary, right?

I don't normally wear my tinfoil hat in public, but it's hard to see this
article as anything but an attempt to sway public opinion on encryption and
monitoring laws.

~~~
nedwin
I think the suggestion they're making is that if intelligence agencies instead
tracked data like who is renting cars/ hotels etc they would be able to better
track potential extremists activities.

Tracking license plates + who is renting hotel rooms is common place in many
parts of the world and is less intrusive than reading everyones email.

~~~
scintill76
So then low-paid hotel night-clerks are part of the front lines of the
intelligence services. I just rented a hotel room with no reservation in the
US a few nights ago. I gave ID, credit card, and car's license plate number. I
was like 80% sure I had my license plate number memorized, but didn't feel
like going outside to check, so I just wrote what I thought it was (without
even indicating which US state it was from, I realized later) because I
figured it didn't matter if they weren't going to verify it. Hopefully my
memory was right, or it's a good thing my ID was not a convincing fake and
that I'm not a terrorist, because the clerk would have failed to feed Big
Brother good data even if there was a real-time national system to enter it
into.

After writing that, I realized your "tracking license plates" may have
referred to automated plate scanners. I think it would still be too easy to
fake or mislead that, and it's going to cost a lot to deploy everywhere. After
they are in every conceivable public location, another attack will happen and
somebody will write, "if we had just known X car was in Y private house's
garage..." and now we have to put surveillance equipment in every home, or
concede that we're founded on ideas that preclude surveillance that intrusive
and there will be times when that prevents law enforcement or national
security.

~~~
nedwin
You can probably use fake ID + fake plates & a fraudulent credit card...
However in this situation in France the terrorists - who were on watch lists -
did none of these things.

Not saying that data would have helped identify that an operation was in
progress but it's data that exists that isn't being recorded. Meanwhile they
want access to our metadata and more.

------
Fiahil
It's even worse. Apparently a critical phone call was intercepted by the DGSE
(the french intelligence) before the attacks (Thursday), and transferred to
the DGSI (the french counter-intelligence). The two are supposed to cooperate
but the threat level could not be assessed by the first one. So, the second
one scheduled a meeting on Monday (3 days after). The attacks took place
between the two events.

Further infos, in french, here: [http://www.canalplus.fr/c-emissions/c-le-
petit-journal/pid65...](http://www.canalplus.fr/c-emissions/c-le-petit-
journal/pid6515-le-petit-journal.html?vid=1334771) [VIDEO]

~~~
scintill76
This is very interesting. I have mixed feelings about focusing on these types
of things too much, because I don't want to accept the premise that we can
stop everything if we just try hard enough. But it can at least demonstrate
that we should think hard before making further compromises of our values, if
we can't even properly handle the capabilities we currently have.

------
jgrahamc
Actually, this article does not say anything about how the plan was "hatched"
(i.e. thought up and planned), it just talks about the final days/hours.

------
elcct
There is so many ways one can contact each other without 3rd party being able
to know, that it makes whole "make encryption illegal!" thing seem to be a
work of terrorists. People holding office and demanding backdoors of any sort,
should be investigated or simply removed from the office, because they are not
fit for the job.

------
a3n
Since the spies can't find people using the data we have now in the clear, we
should not give them access to encrypted comms, because that would be even
_more_ data that they can't deal with; it would make their jobs _harder_ , not
easier. (That is, depending on what we and they think their jobs actually
are.)

------
davidf18
As someone who has been to Israel many, many times I feel that the French
would benefit greatly by consulting with the Israelis regarding running their
anti-terrorist security apparatus.

As things stand, the French and the EU in general have been quite critical of
Israel's attempts to fight Islamic terror.

------
staunch
Car rentals seem like a weak point for terrorists. The options for obtaining a
private vehicle are very limited. Stealing a car is a good way to get busted.
So it hijacking a car.

If the "Do Not Fly" list is a good idea, it probably makes sense to apply it
to car rentals if they don't already.

~~~
scott_hardy
You could always just buy a used car. Makes things a little more expensive,
but not much more.

Terrorists will find a way to terrorize if they want to. The world is so
chaotic and leaky that you can't stop people from doing stuff like this.

~~~
staunch
Requiring police verification to buy a used car doesn't seem crazy. If that's
the only other way of getting a car, it seems like an easy loophole to close.

------
jacquesm
After the attacks one of the attackers while on the run was stopped a total of
3 times and never apprehended.

------
peter303
Couple thousand disgruntled young men capable of being terrorists. Its a
numbers game. Insufficient resources to follow all of them. Only a few have to
sneak through.

The questioned is how to prevent young ethnic men from becoming dissatisfied
and and radicalized.

~~~
krisdol
Cultural integration, social welfare, education.

------
saluki
I think they need to do more to cross check data, one person making multiple
car rentals and room reservations and of course cross check this with the
various watch lists.

Like staunch commented, if someone is on a no fly list, flag car rentals, room
reservations, etc too.

~~~
vox_mollis
Are you legitimately suggesting intelligence agencies should be permitted
unfettered realtime full-take access to arbitrary private companies'
registration systems?

~~~
pcunite
That is what people "think" will help. Let's just allow the government and all
business unfettered access to everything we do. That will "make us safer".

