Yes it was a coordinated attack

[edhopper]

but it was 8 men, who could have met privately two or three at a time, beneath anyone's radar. It wasn't like they were mounting the Battle of the Bulge.
Is it really a "failure of intelligence", as the News constantly has been claiming? Or is it that these attacks by a small handful of individuals are almost impossible to stop.

[alcibiades_mystery]

1. Your ultimate point is well taken

These types of attacks are very difficult to identify and stop.

That said, these guys all had explosive vests. That takes efforts and the acquisition of traceable material. It takes communication outside your group. Two of the teams had rifles and a shitload of ammunition. Again, that's risk, contact outside your group, materials acquisition, all things that the roving networks of Western intelligence agencies and their contacts are meant to pick up.

Indeed, we have some inkling that an attack like this was being guarded against recently, to wit, the arrest in Italy, England, and Norway of the Ansar al-Islam group, just one day before the Paris attacks. Were authorities closing in? Did they launch the attacks because they feared that one of the Ansar al-Islam group would flip? Is that why the stadium attack was so poorly executed?

This wasn't eight guys hatching a plan. There's money, materials, lodging, logistics.

[edhopper]

3. your point is taken as well

[edgineered]

5. Exactly what many people miss

It is almost impossible to keep things quiet as numbers get bigger, that is unless committed to a program such as a military operation. It is almost unthinkable that more than two people with complete knowledge of an operation would succeed as planned.

[Electric Monk]

6. "This wasn't eight guys hatching a plan. There's money, materials, lodging, logistics." +1

Same thing with 9/11/01, it had to have been much bigger than the 19 guys who crashed the planes.

I happen to think Occam's razor leans to Jeb! having helped fix it, though some will disagree on that.

[BootinUp]

2. Almost every intelligence/security professional on tv today

complained about new encryption applications, being sold with phones or computers.

[edhopper]

4. there is that as well

[Igel]

7. The two are far from mutually exclusive.

"Failure of intelligence" can be trivial to the point of vanishing. And yet it's a "failure of intelligence."

It's possible to meet in small groups. It's possible to meet in larger groups in private.

It's possible that much of the materiel was smuggled in. Borders are open; that was a choice, but that choice and not having ways of monitoring everything is a "failure of intelligence", a failure that is a choice resulting from a free society.

Presumably there was communication back and forth between them and their monitors or controllers. But in a data stream that constitutes many GB of data per hour, most in natural language in a possible range of dialects (not just languages) with prearranged codes, "failure of intelligence" is the default.

[Blue_Tires]

8. Anybody calling this a "failure of intelligence"

has no fucking idea whatsoever of how intelligence operates...

There were supposedly 5000 or more persons on the French Government's watch list and that's just in Paris... Having justifiable cause to watch somebody doesn't equate to cause to arrest somebody...

Of course there is another potentially deeper, uglier factor in play here, but that is a discussion/debate to have later time, since unlike 99% of Twitter and the PunditSphere, I want to have some respect for the dead before diving straight into the political jousting....