Quote Originally Posted by Denzark View Post
Civil liberties make it harder for governments to govern. Governments will use any excuse to curtail freedoms. It is said that restrictions on freedoms (ie Patriot Act) were already drawn up before 911 and 911 was merely the excuse to implement them.
I'd guess that most governments - certainly all security services - have a wish list of control and surveilance powers they'd like if it were politically possible. So when the time comes, they just copy and paste that list into draft legislation.
The most effective precaution is intelligence from infiltrators.
Whilst it might not get reported, it doesn't appear that infiltration has been an important tool. In this country the efforts of the police and security services to use infiltration against such noted terrorist organisations as Greenpeace and the Hunt Saboteurs have mostly ended in embarrassing exposures, so I frankly hope the same people are not trying the same tactics against IS.

In countries like ours terrorists rarely operate alone: they rely on the support of an inner circle of true believers for the hard stuff like guns and explosives, and a larger group of half-converted and useful idiots for harmless-looking things like rooms and lifts, all embeded in a community of mostly decent law-abiding people who would turn them in if they knew. The evidence from trials, and from those reports that I can believe about foiled plots, is that what usually stops them is some ordinary citizen noticing something wrong, or one of the outer circle losing their nerve, and alerting the police. Infiltration in such small groups is very hard, but getting the community to notice a problem is not hard ... so long as they aren't all turned against the police and society by systematic abuse and injustice. Unfortunately, most of the panic measures to restrict civil liberties target those communities hardest, as they are designed to, and thus do the recruiters' jobs for them.

This is usually treated as an unintended consequence, but one has to wonder. Oppressors and terrorist resisters need each other, to justify their own existence. Terrorist organisations are quite open and clear about their attempts to make the authorities behave more oppressively to foster radicalisation (it's in Marx and Mao.) Politicians and security leaders are not so frank about wanting to provoke more extreme terrorist violence to justify their own power grabs: but sometimes it's hard not to see it that way.