Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

The Only Way to Prevent Lone Wolf Attacks

Intelligence services can detect lone-wolf behavior online, but many citizens won't like what that means.

July 19, 2016 at 1:18 PM UTC

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

This time, Germany.
Photograph: KARL-JOSEF HILDENBRAND/AFP/Getty Images

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Recent high-profile terror attacks pose a new challenge for police and intelligence services. All seem to be the work of lone wolf actors. Yet police and intelligence services, by the nature of their work, target groups. It's possible to adjust that focus, but that would require Western societies to make an important trade-off.

QuickTake Lone-Wolf Terrorists