| > places don't re-think their strategy for decades because it is hard to measure the effectiveness. How many terrorist attacks and domestic incidents are there (assuming in good faith those are the only things to be prevented) ? I would assume in the absence of any of these national security agencies that there were only very few per year if not decade. That makes it hard to adjust the strategy even if you assume that they are totally focused on security only, and not e.g. on the continued presence of their paycheck of suppression of opposition parties. To give you an example: the (American) security measures at the airport that were introduced in 2001 can be considered a total success, as there has been no incidence since then
(success = good, people can get promoted for that[0]), although these measures have been called security theater at times[1]. And with these measures called successful by those promoted people, why change them? Of course some other people opine that they may not be as successful as they claim they are [2], but it is still hard to quantify. > instead of catching everything you see, you can also collect information until you find a pattern yeah that seems likely. Though this scares me personally as I may demonstrate a pattern now that will make me a suspect in the future, despite doing nothing wrong. [0] I worked at big tech once upon a time
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/01/tsa-bus...
[2] https://www.thelocal.de/20091231/24279 |