The Berlin Christmas Market attack is under investigation here. The LKA (local police force, as opposed to the BKA, which is the federal police) had Amri as a target, but have, allegedly, falsified documents claiming he was a known drug dealer and could have been arrested before the attack, to make it look like he was small fry and not worth bothering with.

That would not surprise me.

Try this : It takes between 15 and 30 people to keep ONE person under proper surveillance. You need to account for lots of things e.g. if the team is too small, the target may notice the same people popping up in the background and become suspicious, you need to hand off if they're moving... it's actually a pretty complicated job and you need to be trained to do it.

Allegedly (with big quotes, because nobody public knows for sure) MI5 has 14,000 surveillance trained staff.

There are (again, allegedly) 2000 people on MI5's 'immediate high risk' watch list, and a total of 20,000 people they have some reason to keep some sort of eye on - note these are all BAD people, but they are not all terrorists; we're also talking about people trafficers, serious drug smugglers etc.

Nevertheless - 14,000 officers, at least 15 officers need to be assigned to a case to cover it properly. As they say, do the math.

So no, they are not going to have 24 hours coverage someone who was reported as being suspicious five years ago. They are in fact not going to have proper surveillance on more than a fraction of the people they have strong up to date evidence on, let alone those who are a bit sus but haven't actually done anything yet.

This kind of second guessing really pisses me off. Yep, they were made aware of him at some point. No, they don't keep 24 hour tabs on everyone they think might be a nutter because the don't have a literal army of people to do it. And we don't live in a police state.

You want to catch every nutter before they do something, every time? REALLY? I don't think you're willing to make the sacrifices that would require, franky.

You have a guy who has been reported on by his own community numerous times, who has just returned from Libya, has a questionable family, and who attends Didsbury mosque? A place that must be well known to police, never mind MI5 and 6. He didn't flag up as missing since the mosque is likely under surveillance? Or at least at the bloody airport?

I'm not saying the security services can follow everyone, I'm from Belfast ffs. But every time there's an attack by these twisted punters we're told that they were known to security forces, that they have involvement in drugs, and that there has been prior warning, usually from an outside agency.

Every. Time.

Whatever way you cut it, there are multiple failures in every recent instance. We live in an age of computers that operate with algorithms, tags, probability software*... We know that GCHQ alone has the capability to do all of that automatically thanks to Snowden. I'm to believe this guy, for all the reasons listed above, didn't light up multiple databases? As I've said, what fcuking use is all that data if it isn't being effectively collated in time to be acted upon? That's a waste of resources.

Numbers are important. In this case, tragically, the sheer amount of innocent people killed by Captain Deranged has prompted MI5 to finally come under a bit of real scrutiny from the press. I'm saying it should have happened long before this.

* Remember the ISC blaming Facebook for not forwarding information?!

I've been away from Manchester for the bank holiday weekend and read this morning that there was an armed police raid in Whalley Range at a house in the next street to me, literally a few hundred metres away. Scary news!

Makes you realise that you really don't know what's going on in your own neighbourhood - I come from a tight knit community in the Yorkshire Dales where you know everyone in the area, which just makes the difference all the more obvious. I didn't know until I got back here this afternoon whether my street was going to be cordoned off by the police and then possibly looking for a hotel for tonight. Thankfully, there was no signs of the police when I got back and I could get to my house. I believe there were no arrests but the police are still searching the house where this Libian widow and her 6 children lived. It's too close to home and makes me want to move out of this area, which is a shame as I've always felt relatively safe here. Then there's a part of me that thinks "F*** that, why should I let them win?"

There's been 3 police raids very close to me in the last week, one in Chorlton - a lovely area less than a mile away - and now 2 in Whalley Range - again, a nice area, or so I thought. Of course, I realise they pick these affluent areas to avoid detection, I understand that, so you can't draw too many conclusions from the locations.

I understand, and thank, the police for their valuable actions in detecting potential suspicious activity, but it's still a shock that it's so close to home for me.

OK, how many times a year are people reported to the security services in total. And what's a foolproof way of telling the actually-aren't-nutters from the actually-are -nutters?

What you've got here is a massive case of confirmation bias. Almost certainly every single actual nutjob gets reported to the authorities at some point or other. So when they do something maniacally stupid and horrendous, there is always a history of them having been reported, so you can always say 'Look, they didn't act on that piece of intelligence, they're a bunch of useless idiots'. What you're not taking into account is they also got 10,000 other people reported to them that year who did nothing more than say some controversial things in a mosque at some point, and there's no easy way to tell group A from group B until very shortly before they do that horrendous thing.

What you're saying is 'look, there's only the one needle in that haystack, why can't they just find that?'


Yes, I'm sure there are 'algorithms' for this kind of stuff (/sarcasm).


I'd absolutely agree, as it happens. MI5/6 and co need proper scrutiny and their failings in this case do need to be examined and understood. We really don't know what their hit rate is though, but it can never actually be good enough. Because if even one or two nutters out of god-knows-how-many get lucky, then we've got blood on the streets.

So the next time some nutter gets lucky, we'll be here and we'll have this same conversation because no matter how much they do, and what they improve, they can never be perfect and as long as they aren't perfect sometimes evil people will succeed in hurting and killing innocent people. And I suspect they're very well aware of that themselves.