[RonanTheGrey]

> to trigger a "Sum of All Fears" scale event, a spying scandal that eclipses all prior scandals, and which outrages hundreds of millions of people like never before

Yep. I've spent most of my life searching for solutions that don't require that level of excess, but the problem is, it is a feature of human cognition that we don't learn until we are forced to (more precisely, we do not fix social, economic and political problems until something so extreme comes along that we can't ignore them anymore, usually due to some version of a threat to survival). E.g. - consequences.

The alternative is the boiled frog, and yet another feature of human cognition is the ability to normalize our conditions. If something goes on long enough, it'll simply become "the way things are" and go unchallenged. You avoid this by flashing quickly to the worst outcome so people realize that it exists.

This is a long way of saying "Humans perceive consequences on short timescales, not long ones" and it really, really sucks.