In the less than a week since the Christmas Day bombing attempt on approach to Detroit conventional wisdom has already calcified around the notion that this represents an intelligence failure, an intelligence-sharing failure, and more evidence that we take a Keystone Kops approach to counterterrorism.
But of course it isn’t as simple as all that, and Spencer Ackerman has a succinct but fine-grained explanation of the policy implications involved here, as well as the potential trade-offs involved if you want the government to (over)react to every potential threat.
