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...
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.
Many of these terror plots are orchestrated by the FBI. Source: https://theintercept.com/2015/03/16/howthefbicreatedaterrori...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:List_of_unsuccessful_terr...
Terrorism is bullshit. Sadly, we can't do the right thing because the country is full of cowardly morons who think that the solution is toppling more governments, killing more people, and hoping that somehow this time will be different.
The transparency report I'd love to see, which I doubt will ever be released, is the number of stings which end up being LEOs on both sides, in which e.g. one handler is hoping to sting a weapons dealer and the other is hoping to sting a weapons buyer.
That would be a great Pink Panther sketch/scene :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.