7 ms·

Paris Attacks Plot Was Hatched in Plain Sight

165 points by frostmatthew 11y ago

mgo 11y ago
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.
- alecksandros 11y ago
  We don't exactly have data on foiled terrorism attempts and so it is difficult to say "no benefit". That being said we need a way to gauge risk/reward as citizens regarding terrorism/privacy. There should be openness regarding the actual terrorism risks and what giving up certain freedoms/privacy actually gains us in protection from said risks. A system where terrorism scorecard is openly available so we can weigh pros/cons is probably never going to happen though.
- aking2 11y ago
  Did you thought about the fact that other acts of terrorism where prevented and most of them keep secret because of the nature of investigations?
  - DamnYuppie 11y ago
    Yes, I think about it all the time but when pressed for numbers the CIA/NSA/FBI never reveal any. What isn't discussed here is the numerous times that these institutions have actually created terrorists. Or lead people to a course of action of their choosing.
  - Retra 11y ago
    "Because of the nature" is not a reason for keeping victories secret. A democratic government is responsible to its people. Moreover, you do not do a very good job of preventing terrorism by keeping secret all the times terrorism fails and publicly over-reacting every time it does.
  - dirktheman 11y ago
    Genuinly curious: why would they hide their successes? It would change public perception about the surveillance, and it would also act as a deterrent to potential terrorists. I get that they don't want to reveal their methods, but I can't see any issues with sharing their successes.
    - krapp 11y ago
      Revealing their successes would probably just lead skeptics to believe they were engaging in propaganda, and it probably wouldn't act as a deterrent to terrorists at all.
      - dirktheman 11y ago
        Maybe... On the other hand, keeping silent doesn't seem to convert a whole lot of skeptics either. And revealing a couple of successes would probably result in a lot more votes for your administration the next elections, right?
        krapp 11y ago
        It certainly could bring in political capital, but aren't politicians who do that already accused of manufacturing terrorist plots and ratcheting up fear for points during election season? How valuable is public relations for the US intelligence community versus keeping their methods secret (within a culture of secrecy?) It's not as though the CIA or NSA are likely to be defunded soon, regardless of who gets elected.
    - aianus 11y ago
      Revealing how the plots were foiled might teach future would-be terrorists how to better avoid detection. Just to play devil's advocate.
- aresant 11y ago
  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_terrorist_plots_in_the_United_States_post-9/11 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsuccessful_terrori...
  - fukusa 11y ago
    >There have been dozens of publicly disclosed terror plots interrupted against the USA alone Many of these terror plots are orchestrated by the FBI. Source: https://theintercept.com/2015/03/16/howthefbicreatedaterrorist/ https://theintercept.com/2015/03/16/howthefbicreatedaterrori...
  - scrollaway 11y ago
    > There is a clear underlying reason for survellience - it works. It works, but not (just) for terrorism prevention. It also works great for other things, such as preventing political ideologies you don't like from spreading. Or just in general as a power play over citizens.
  - moistgorilla 11y ago
    Ah yes, the Brooklyn Bridge terrorist that was trying to use a jackhammer to bring it down. Thank you NSA for preventing this tragedy that could only prevented with pervasive surveillance.
  - kefs 11y ago
    The Talk section of the Wiki article lists the many problems with that list.. You really should stop citing it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:List_of_unsuccessful_terrorist_plots_in_the_United_States_post-9/11#Incredibly_biased_title_and_premise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:List_of_unsuccessful_terr...
- hokkos 11y ago
  No there won't be degradation of encryption, the politicians no longer have any weight against megacorp like Apple and Google, and open source isn't bound by the wants of the USA. The failing of the french spying agencies is one of scale, they didn't scale to the exponential progression of jihadist x100 in few years.
jgrahamc 11y ago
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.
staunch 11y ago
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.
- rl3 11y ago
  >If the "Do Not Fly" list is a good idea, ... It isn't.
  - servercobra 11y ago
    I don't necessarily disagree, but any reasoning?
    - afarrell 11y ago
      Cutting people off from economic activity without due process or even explanation violates several different conceptions of justice.
    - rl3 11y ago
      If there's no cause to arrest the person on sight, then there's no cause to prohibit their travel. Anything less is simply amateur hour counter-terrorism technique, and a massive civil liberties violation to boot.
- scott_hardy 11y ago
  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.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - 11y ago
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
misiti3780 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
elcct 11y ago
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.
saluki 11y ago
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 11y ago
  Are you legitimately suggesting intelligence agencies should be permitted unfettered realtime full-take access to arbitrary private companies' registration systems?
  - pcunite 11y ago
    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".
baku-fr 11y ago
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.
- danharaj 11y ago
  I'm not sure how much freedom I actually have considering how much of my life has to be sold to someone else so I don't starve to death in the cold and rain.
  - pauleastlund 11y ago
    You need to look up "freedom." It doesn't mean "other people are required to meet all of your needs."
    - rorykoehler 11y ago
      Much of our seeming choices are predetermined by a corporation/politician, the de rigueur political/economic philosophy of the day and also by the era we are born into. It's unfortunate this topic is out of bounds in most places. Even here on hackernews you're shutting him down. This conversation is potentially one of the most important we could be having today.
    - bildung 11y ago
      > You need to look up "freedom." It doesn't mean "other people are required to meet all of your needs." There are quite a few definitions of freedom that actually require that (to a certain degree), even on wikipedia. As in the theory of justice, there are two broad views on freedom: one side seeing freedom as something abstract (by law you are free to vote; the constitution does not discriminate against skin color, gender etc.) and the other side sees freedom as the concrete opportunity space of an individual (therefore studying should be free of cost, access to healthcare should be free etc.). Interestingly, the abstract interpretation seems to match the common meaning in the U.S. and the concrete meaning of the word is more common in Europe. That seems to explain quite a few misunderstandings in spaces like HN :) I can really recommend Amarty Sen's book 'The idea of justice' as a quite approachable introduction into the topic.
Fiahil 11y ago
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/pid6515-le-petit-journal.html?vid=1334771 http://www.canalplus.fr/c-emissions/c-le-petit-journal/pid65... [VIDEO]
- scintill76 11y ago
  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.
jacquesm 11y ago
After the attacks one of the attackers while on the run was stopped a total of 3 times and never apprehended.
jmnicolas 11y ago
> [...]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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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.
  - gph 11y ago
    >And coming from the WSJ I'm even more surprised Well given its current owner, not all that shocking even if he insists they maintain independent editorial integrity.
peter303 11y ago
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 11y ago
  Cultural integration, social welfare, education.
shanemhansen 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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.
davidf18 11y ago
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.
a3n 11y ago
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.)

165 points by frostmatthew 11y ago

mgo 11y ago

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.

alecksandros 11y ago
We don't exactly have data on foiled terrorism attempts and so it is difficult to say "no benefit". That being said we need a way to gauge risk/reward as citizens regarding terrorism/privacy. There should be openness regarding the actual terrorism risks and what giving up certain freedoms/privacy actually gains us in protection from said risks. A system where terrorism scorecard is openly available so we can weigh pros/cons is probably never going to happen though.
aking2 11y ago
Did you thought about the fact that other acts of terrorism where prevented and most of them keep secret because of the nature of investigations?
- DamnYuppie 11y ago
  Yes, I think about it all the time but when pressed for numbers the CIA/NSA/FBI never reveal any. What isn't discussed here is the numerous times that these institutions have actually created terrorists. Or lead people to a course of action of their choosing.
- Retra 11y ago
  "Because of the nature" is not a reason for keeping victories secret. A democratic government is responsible to its people. Moreover, you do not do a very good job of preventing terrorism by keeping secret all the times terrorism fails and publicly over-reacting every time it does.
- dirktheman 11y ago
  Genuinly curious: why would they hide their successes? It would change public perception about the surveillance, and it would also act as a deterrent to potential terrorists. I get that they don't want to reveal their methods, but I can't see any issues with sharing their successes.
  - krapp 11y ago
    Revealing their successes would probably just lead skeptics to believe they were engaging in propaganda, and it probably wouldn't act as a deterrent to terrorists at all.
    - dirktheman 11y ago
      Maybe... On the other hand, keeping silent doesn't seem to convert a whole lot of skeptics either. And revealing a couple of successes would probably result in a lot more votes for your administration the next elections, right?
      - krapp 11y ago
        It certainly could bring in political capital, but aren't politicians who do that already accused of manufacturing terrorist plots and ratcheting up fear for points during election season? How valuable is public relations for the US intelligence community versus keeping their methods secret (within a culture of secrecy?) It's not as though the CIA or NSA are likely to be defunded soon, regardless of who gets elected.
  - aianus 11y ago
    Revealing how the plots were foiled might teach future would-be terrorists how to better avoid detection. Just to play devil's advocate.
aresant 11y ago
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_terrorist_plots_in_the_United_States_post-9/11 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsuccessful_terrori...
- fukusa 11y ago
  >There have been dozens of publicly disclosed terror plots interrupted against the USA alone Many of these terror plots are orchestrated by the FBI. Source: https://theintercept.com/2015/03/16/howthefbicreatedaterrorist/ https://theintercept.com/2015/03/16/howthefbicreatedaterrori...
- scrollaway 11y ago
  > There is a clear underlying reason for survellience - it works. It works, but not (just) for terrorism prevention. It also works great for other things, such as preventing political ideologies you don't like from spreading. Or just in general as a power play over citizens.
- moistgorilla 11y ago
  Ah yes, the Brooklyn Bridge terrorist that was trying to use a jackhammer to bring it down. Thank you NSA for preventing this tragedy that could only prevented with pervasive surveillance.
- kefs 11y ago
  The Talk section of the Wiki article lists the many problems with that list.. You really should stop citing it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:List_of_unsuccessful_terrorist_plots_in_the_United_States_post-9/11#Incredibly_biased_title_and_premise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:List_of_unsuccessful_terr...
hokkos 11y ago
No there won't be degradation of encryption, the politicians no longer have any weight against megacorp like Apple and Google, and open source isn't bound by the wants of the USA. The failing of the french spying agencies is one of scale, they didn't scale to the exponential progression of jihadist x100 in few years.

jgrahamc 11y ago

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.

staunch 11y ago

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.

rl3 11y ago
>If the "Do Not Fly" list is a good idea, ... It isn't.
- servercobra 11y ago
  I don't necessarily disagree, but any reasoning?
  - afarrell 11y ago
    Cutting people off from economic activity without due process or even explanation violates several different conceptions of justice.
  - rl3 11y ago
    If there's no cause to arrest the person on sight, then there's no cause to prohibit their travel. Anything less is simply amateur hour counter-terrorism technique, and a massive civil liberties violation to boot.
scott_hardy 11y ago
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.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

misiti3780 11y ago

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 11y ago
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.

elcct 11y ago

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.

saluki 11y ago

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 11y ago
Are you legitimately suggesting intelligence agencies should be permitted unfettered realtime full-take access to arbitrary private companies' registration systems?
- pcunite 11y ago
  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".

baku-fr 11y ago

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.

danharaj 11y ago
I'm not sure how much freedom I actually have considering how much of my life has to be sold to someone else so I don't starve to death in the cold and rain.
- pauleastlund 11y ago
  You need to look up "freedom." It doesn't mean "other people are required to meet all of your needs."
  - rorykoehler 11y ago
    Much of our seeming choices are predetermined by a corporation/politician, the de rigueur political/economic philosophy of the day and also by the era we are born into. It's unfortunate this topic is out of bounds in most places. Even here on hackernews you're shutting him down. This conversation is potentially one of the most important we could be having today.
  - bildung 11y ago
    > You need to look up "freedom." It doesn't mean "other people are required to meet all of your needs." There are quite a few definitions of freedom that actually require that (to a certain degree), even on wikipedia. As in the theory of justice, there are two broad views on freedom: one side seeing freedom as something abstract (by law you are free to vote; the constitution does not discriminate against skin color, gender etc.) and the other side sees freedom as the concrete opportunity space of an individual (therefore studying should be free of cost, access to healthcare should be free etc.). Interestingly, the abstract interpretation seems to match the common meaning in the U.S. and the concrete meaning of the word is more common in Europe. That seems to explain quite a few misunderstandings in spaces like HN :) I can really recommend Amarty Sen's book 'The idea of justice' as a quite approachable introduction into the topic.

Fiahil 11y ago

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/pid6515-le-petit-journal.html?vid=1334771 http://www.canalplus.fr/c-emissions/c-le-petit-journal/pid65... [VIDEO]

scintill76 11y ago
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.

jacquesm 11y ago

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

jmnicolas 11y ago

> [...]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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
- gph 11y ago
  >And coming from the WSJ I'm even more surprised Well given its current owner, not all that shocking even if he insists they maintain independent editorial integrity.

peter303 11y ago

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 11y ago
Cultural integration, social welfare, education.

shanemhansen 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.

davidf18 11y ago

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.

a3n 11y ago

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.)