What’s missing from this piece is any mention of the true underlying problem: taking government…

What’s missing from this piece is any mention of the true underlying problem: taking government claims of a need for a certain capability at face value.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, U.S. government intelligence and law enforcement officials, with a lot of help from House and Senate members on both sides of the aisle, were able to sell the falsehood that if only we’d had enough information the attacks could’ve been stopped. But as the subsequent Congressional and 9/11 Commission investigations found, the government had all the data it needed — the failure was in the CIA, NSA, and FBI “connecting the dots” (as the 9/11 Commission observed) by properly sharing the available data at the time.

As we’ve seen with so many post-9/11 terror attacks in Europe and North America, the same problem persists among the law enforcement and intelligence agencies of the Western world. But for politicians on both sides of the Atlantic, it’s often simply easier to pass yet another law giving still more sweeping surveillance authorities to intelligence and law enforcement organizations that have demonstrated time and again that they have failed to learn from their own intelligence gathering, analysis, and sharing failures. Until that core problem is addressed, it will be impossible to have a truly intellectually and politically honest debate about the reasons Salafist terrorists continue to wreak havoc in the West.