[gordian-mind]

This is just a nerdy reference to the activity of gathering intelligence.

> But again, to me this shows the danger of making decisions based on spying technology.

Having more information is rarely a bad thing for making decisions. So that was probably not the point.

[lcnPylGDnU4H9OF]

> Having more information is rarely a bad thing for making decisions.

It’s a bad thing commonly enough that it has a name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic

The caution in the tale is that attention paid to what is known might distract from what is unknown.

[notpushkin]

> Having more information is rarely a bad thing for making decisions

In some cases it leads to pretty bad things though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overdiagnosis

And more generally, the more information you gather, the more extraordinary processing you have to put in place to get anything useful out of it.

[marcosdumay]

If your enemy (and the US seems to place absolutely everyone on this category nowadays) has the power to insert information at will into your spying device, it will always be much, much worse than useless.