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.
[Additional coverage after the break]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Bot on Wednesday November 18 2015, @05:49PM
The normal reaction to enemy strikes is to badmouth and belittle them. "Keep calm and carry on", "Americans are going to surrender or be burned in their tanks. They will surrender, it is they who will surrender". The only exception is the propaganda about leaking information which is intentionally "loose lips sink ships" paranoid.
Except that ISIS echo chamber is: western media.
I have no objection to a constant stream of alerts turned false alarms, but this is not the case.
The funniest thing is the mirror climbing about attributing responsibility for what is happening to the western society in general, as if we controlled the web of interests that causes the crisis.
Anyway, CIA boss, you know what would help to fight terrorism? roadblocks on every street, curfew, everybody having to go outside on a straitjacket, warrantless pentothal injections, monarchy. In a word, high treason.
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