I don&#x27;t think we need complicated conspiracy theories that demonise intelligence workers to explain this sort of narrative. There&#x27;s now a group of people whose job is to use bulk data intercept to predict and stop crimes before they happen, essentially a Minority Report but real (they do other things too, but let&#x27;s ignore that for now).<p>As no group of people can be 100% effective, they will always occasionally fail even if they succeed most of the time, and when they do their explanation for their own failure will always be &quot;we needed more&quot;. And they will truly believe that! No secret agenda needed. From their POV it&#x27;s the only answer they can possibly give.<p>I fully expect in the coming weeks to learn (shock) that the terrorists had Facebook accounts, used WhatsApp, searched on Google, used iPhones and the DGCE will undoubtably claim that if they had access to all those things the plot could have been detected earlier and stopped. What else are they gonna say? &quot;Whoops, our bad&quot;?