November 16, 2015 | Quote

2 Reasons the Paris Attacks Were Especially Alarming

Investigators and the public have yet to get a complete picture of Friday night's terrorist attacks in Paris, which have killed at least 129 people.

Investigators and the public have yet to get a complete picture of Friday night's terrorist attacks in Paris, which have killed at least 129 people.

It's unclear where and how they were planned, whether they were executed with the orders or coordination of terrorist leadership based outside of France, and why certain targets were selected.

Although ISIS has claimed responsibility for the carnage, both ISIS and Al Qaeda attempted to connect themselves to the January attacks in Paris that killed 17 people — attacks in which there was evidence of cooperation between ISIS and Al Qaeda elements.

It's too early to draw definitive conclusions about the worst terror attack on European soil since the 2004 Madrid train bombings. But the magnitude and the sophistication of the assault in Paris already suggests two alarming things about the capabilities of terrorist groups and the Western intelligence services' ability to stop them.

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“A few years ago people hoped the age of mass-casualty incidents in Western states was gone because surveillance or interruptions from authorities could prevent attacks like this,” Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Business Insider. “This has put a definitive end to those hopes.”

Gartenstein-Ross said that the attack reveals “a shift in capabilities, but not a shift in intentions” for terrorist organizations.

“For something like this to succeed with so many people involved and with such a complex attack — it has to change the way that we think about these groups,” he said.

“The fact that an attack this big occurred suggests to me an erosion in surveillance capabilities compared to magnitude of the threat,” Gartenstein-Ross said.

So where, exactly, are those capabilities eroding? Though information on the planning of the attacks is virtually nonexistent right now, Gartenstein-Ross raised the possibility that attackers had figured out what methods of encryption or communication European and US surveillance had trouble cracking, effectively adapting to their adversaries' methods and behavior.

As Gartenstein-Ross noted, some of the terrorists who carried out the July 7, 2005, attack in London were under surveillance and “on record talking about how they wanted to carry out attacks and kill westerners.” For whatever reason, these intentions couldn't be linked to a plot in progress.

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