Paris - a watershed moment?

Is tonight’s horrific, appalling, reprehensible act of terrorism in Paris a watershed moment?

Wall Street Journal

We have dichotomized the threat of terrorism from Islamic extremists into two categories; those (older-style) well planned, centrally coordinated attacks like 911 and those carried out by the 'lone wolf'. Doing so has has created a false sense of security; the conventional wisdom is that the large attack will be detected and prevented because their  'footprint' is large and detectable by  current surveillance, and the lone wolf, though harder to catch, won't do that much damage (little enough that we accept that there's little we can do but live with the threat).

Tonight's attack, coming somewhere between these two suggests that we can't be that complacent; a pack of self-organising, locally coordinated lone-wolves can do enormous damage. 

It's hard to predict what might happen at these points of discontinuity; responses are seldom linear. The long term, however, is perhasp easier to predict that the short term. Europe is in turmoil from the migration crisis. This will only add to calls for tighter border control, and fuel anti-immigrant sentiment. Borders will close; countries will become more xenophobic and nationalist; immigration will be curtailed and immigrants subject to increasingly close and unequal scrutiny. Surveillance will increase; Edward Snowden will come top be regarded not as a defender of civil liberties but as a naive fool; "Big Brother" will be watching us all and we will simply have to get used to it. In hindsight, the last 50 years of relative calm and increasing openness will come to be seen as a temporary aberration.