Re: Terror attack in Xinjiang
What China is experiencing now is the nightmare scenario western intelligence and security agencies are fearing about their nationals repatriating after waging jihad in foreign lands and bringing their knowledge, training, experience, networks and violence back home.
No wall can keep out traitors in your own ranks.
But geography makes a mockery of any attempt to fully secure a land boarder as vast as China's, so that's not really an option.
Even the US, with all its money and power, cannot keep out rag-tag bands of South America civilians. China trying to keep out well organised, financed, trained and equipped international terrorists along a far longer boarder with a fraction of the US boarder security budget is plainly never going to happen.
I think the big mistake the Chinese government did was clamp down so hard on the internet in Xinjiang. That in effect force educated all the hard core radicals in counter surveillance, which makes it much harder to monitor and identify the hardcore extremists at early stages of their radicalisation and development as would-be terrorists.
People may roll their eyes and laugh and police visit houses in the US because someone searched for pressure cookers after looking at something else before hand, but that is the kind if thing that would have stopped would be attackers, and it's why the US government employ such methods.
While the knowledge to mask IPs and encrypt communications is available to all, few terrorists start off deciding they want to be terrorists from childhood, and radicalisation does not happen overnight. In the US and other western countries, usually by the time someone has been radicalised enough to seriously consider committing terrorists acts and starts to employ counter survillence methods, its already far too late for the would be terrorists, as their unsecured internet history would have likely already put them on government watch lists, and if such people suddenly start going dark, that's when they start shooting up the threat list, and the authorities would likely already have on file their real names, address and other personnel details from before they started to secure their communications, so they would have a huge leg up in finding these people and either bringing them in, or watch them for suspicious activity and potentially root out entire hidden cells.
