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On Monday at the Center for Strategic & International Studies' Global Security Forum, John Brennan, Director of the US' Central Intelligence Agency, spoke about the recent bombings in Paris. In what many commentators took as a reference to Edward Snowden, but could instead refer to the Church Committee, Brennan predicted that finding the attackers will be more difficult than it would have been, had intelligence services been left unchecked:
In the past several years, because of a number of unauthorized disclosures and a lot of hand-wringing over the government's role in the effort to try to uncover these terrorists, there have been some policy and legal and other actions that are taken that make our ability collectively, internationally to find these terrorists much more challenging.
I do hope that this is going to be a wake-up call particularly in areas of Europe where I think there has been a misrepresentation of what the intelligence security services are doing by some quarters that are designed to undercut those capabilities.
[...]
There are a lot of technological capabilities that are available right now that make it exceptionally difficult both technically as well as legally for intelligence security services to have insight that they need to uncover it.
Brennan's complete remarks are available in video via C-SPAN.
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(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday November 19 2015, @03:41PM
Tribalists do have a loyalty: to their tribe, which is another way of describing a really really extended family. That kind of loyalty is not unusual, nor is it non-existent in the US - many Irish-Americans still identify with the Irish in Ireland, for example, even to the point of supporting the IRA.
But you're right that the British and French made huge mistakes when drawing up the map of the region: If you compare this map [vanityfair.com] based on current cultural differences and boundaries, or this map [wikimedia.org] by T.E. Lawrence (a.k.a. Lawrence of Arabia) to the map that they actually drew, it seems like the British diplomats who drew the maps were completely, obviously, disastrously wrong. Which isn't surprising, given the many other massive strategic mistakes made by all the players after World War I.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.