Observations on the Surveillance that Resulted in the Capture of Salah Abdeslam

Interesting analysis from The Grugq:

Bottom Line Up Front

• Intelligence agencies must cooperate more rapidly and proactively to counter ISIS' rapid and haphazard operational tempo.
• Clandestine operatives must rely on support networks that include overt members of the public. These networks are easily mapped out based on metadata available to nation state level security forces.
• Fugitives should learn to cook if they want to minimize their footprint and improve their security.
• Exposure of clandestine networks is inevitable, given modern data sources. Only extremely disciplined non-organic organizations can hope to survive for long.

Details at the link.

That third item is related to the "unusually large" pizza order that alerted the police that there were more people in the house than should be.

The bottom bottom line is that tracking people, and tracing groups of people, has become easy because of all the unencrypted metadata we generate everywhere.