From my reading of the history of these kind of organisations, I think what’s happening is twofold - firstly, that they’re often looking at the wrong people/gro

From my reading of the history of these kind of organisations, I think what’s happening is twofold - firstly, that they’re often looking at the wrong people/groups, and secondly, just so much intelligence they have just ends up being wrong or misleading. Their mission has become “collect it all”, but I think they (and a lot of commentators and even everyday people) can’t really imagine what a large percentage of intelligence is useless noise, deliberately wrong (such as counterintelligence but they don’t realise), just plain wrong (like most intel gathered from torture - people will say literally anything they think you want to hear), correct but misinterpreted, etc.. And it’s extremely hard to meaningfully sort through that much information. I expect they do expend a lot of effort trying to combat this, but historically I don’t believe they’re very good at it, and I’m sceptical machine learning and things like that is really going to help that much. And then just watching the wrong people. Take the Boston bombing, for instance. There are reports that the key focus of groups like the DHS at the time in that area were the Occupy Boston protests, so the bombing happened even though the FBI had been tipped off about one of the bombers from Russian intelligence services. Then things like the NZ mosque attack, where this far-right wing white supremacist came from Australia and murdered a bunch of people. At the time, the media where I am in Australia was reporting FUD campaigns from Australian security agencies about ISIS and Islamic terrorism, radicalisation etc., so I imagine that’s where the focus was and he slipped through. This goes way back throughout history. Just think of the massive amount of wasted resources surveilling suspected “communists and homosexuals” back in the day. Here they had agents actually infiltrating university communist groups. The groups got up to extremely dangerous things like going to protests - great use of millions of dollars of surveillance...