[renewiltord]

Because our intelligence agencies do fail (the Trump assassination attempt is the most recent). We can choose to construct epicyclic explanations for this or we can update our priors broadly. Only outcomes will determine which is right. I think our intelligence orgs are probably not uniquely immune to the quality failures the rest of our government orgs are experiencing.

[op00to]

How is an intelligence organization supposed to predict with certainty an assassin working alone?

[mrguyorama]

Someone who only really decided to shoot Trump like the week of the rally, and didn't have to do anything that a normal american doesn't do in order to obtain a rifle, a bunch of ammo, an aerial view of the location, and practice time firing said gun.

A reminder that if you want to live in a country where it is normal to buy a brand new assault rifle, 200 rounds of ammo, and go shoot it all in the same weekend, you CANNOT preemptively stop a mass shooter or wannabee assassin. Nothing he did should put up red flags in a private gun ownership country.

[ghodith]

He used his father's rifle purchased in 2013, so you can amend your statement to:

"A reminder that if you want to live in a country where it is normal to own an assault rifle..."

[dylan604]

Clearly they need access to more of everyone's private communications so they can predict more accurately /s

[kergonath]

A finite number of failures absolutely does not imply that they never caught any spy except this one. What kind of logic is that?

Looking at the regular expulsions of embassy employees all over the world it should be rather obvious that there is a lot going on about which “we” never hear anything.

(By “we”, I mean normal people having other activities than following closely geopolitics. There is a lot of information to find if you are dedicated enough. A lot of misinformation as well.)

[larkost]

I don't disagree that intelligence agencies fail, but I don't think that the attempted assassination of former-President Trump counts. The shooter appears to have acted completely alone, and so far it seems that he did not give obvious signs online before committing this (yes, he looked up some things about JFK's assassination, but that does not seem enough to raise real flags).

So there was no conspiracy, let alone a foreign one, for the intelligence agencies to have triggered on. This very much looks like a failure of the Secret Service agency, and it will be interesting to see what the final failure analysis looks like, and what they determine can be done better in the future.

And I think the "quality failures the rest of our government orgs are experiencing" is you projecting a bias. If you really think that things are going down hill, please find quantifiable metrics to show that.

[eastbound]

> so far it seems that he did not give obvious signs online before committing this

It is suspicious that person who was radicalized enough to organize an attack on a president would have never said anything radical on the internet and not left a manifesto. A good guy that turned a killer overnight. Sometimes you wake up on the wrong foot ey.

[lolc]

I'm not surprised. Wanting to assassinate a high-profile person to "fix things" is a very common conception. While I can see how the lacking security is taken as suspicious, the existence of lone wolfs should not be.

[mdp2021]

Not everybody uses social networks; not all radicals plan assassinations.