It was the same deal here with the Boston bombers. Mooks already hot on the radar due to passage of information from other friendly intel operations manage to somehow organize and perform a large scale attack. It's almost as though preventing terrorism isn't the main focus of these totalitarian programs or something. Anyways, if anything, failures of intelligence like these should elicit budget cuts and re-strategizing rather than re-investment into a proven failed avenue-- a failed avenue that, when functioning properly, deprives the population of human rights, and when failing, fails silently and violently at the expense of the same public that was also hurt during the "successful" period.
A sober approach is to accept that there is no way to prevent people from killing each other; after all, even in prison people manage to kill each other.
> It's almost as though preventing terrorism isn't the main focus of these totalitarian programs or something.
I suspect that the main focus is preventing as much terrorism as operational constraints permit. Some of the people fingered as "possible terrorists" are not terrorists at all; maybe their friend or their brother is trying to recruit them, so they show up as a possible. How much are you willing to infringe on those peoples' lives in order to prevent terrorist attacks? How much of that will society put up with?
The problem is that you often don't know someone is a terrorist until they actually do something. You may suspect, but you don't know. But you also suspect 10 times as many people who never do anything ("10" being a made-up number, but I'm pretty sure it's more than 2). What's your threshold for cracking down? How many innocent people do you jail to prevent 130 innocent people from being killed?
And then you have to keep them jailed, which under the current laws would not work for very long. There is a very short window of time between 'could be a terrorist' and 'blew himself up in a crowd' where such an intervention would work and would legally stick. But there is a much longer window of time (decades,typically) during which one can make sure a mind is hardened against the process that turns a young, promising person into a suicide bomber. We're much too focused on that very small sliver of time and totally neglecting the decades preceding.
Ah I'm not advocating budget cuts but I do think a certain understanding that ignoring intelligence from friendly governments is the kind of thing that ends your career.
Similarly, the organization needs to adjust to avoid similar lapses in judgement in the future.
A sober approach is to accept that there is no way to prevent people from killing each other; after all, even in prison people manage to kill each other.