Last weekend, terrorists shot up various venues around Paris, killing 129 and wounding over 300. The attacks have been labeled by many as an intelligence failure and a sophisticated attack on Western civilization.

French Intelligence and even the Americans blew it, even with advanced surveillance technology at their fingertips. The NSA's reach is well-documented in the Snowden leaks. Billions of dollars spent to track cell phones, email, instant messages, and social network activity.

The French spy on their citizenry, as do the Russians, the Germans, and the British. We are living in a surveillance state mostly targeting mobile users, social users, communication users, Internet users. In other words: you.

Yet...seven guys who may have been sent over from some organization, ISIS or otherwise, who probably kept to themselves and didn't spend all day posting selfies, could have stayed in play for decades if they just met together every week or so and plotted this scheme in the privacy of a residence.

Unless one on the group was a mole, or stupid enough to chat about the scheme online, there was no reason to suspect anything was going on. This is the way traditional secret operations have been carried out. It is only a recent phenomenon that the Internet, computers, and Facebook have made it appear as if everyone wants to post selfies with the title "Jihadist."

This change in the electronic landscape led to a phenomenon called "chatter." The spy agencies often talk about the volume of chatter they perceive before a major terrorist event, as if everyone knows so much about it that the communications traffic increases amongst these groups. Apparently, they all get giddy before any attack they know about in advance.

The chatter is up, the chatter is increasing, the chatter is down. Chatter, chatter, chatter.

In the Paris attack, there was no chatter. For some reason this is shocking to intelligence agencies, because the terrorists all had to somehow be in communication. It seems sophisticated, but it's probably not. A bunch of guys planned to create havoc, and likely used a technique called verbal communication, aka talking to each other. Haven't mobsters done this sort of thing for ages?

To today's snoops, though, the idea of a secret meeting to plan an attack is unheard of. Because the intelligence organizations all think that everything is done over modern electronic devices (it's a miracle that the American Revolution happened without mobile phones and Twitter), these murderers must have used some sort of advanced encryption. It's already started, but get ready for officials to take another run at demonizing encryption.