This is no different to Crawlers used in web-indexing projects (google, duckduckgo, baidu, Apple Siri). You dislike this not because it could be defined as inv

This is no different to Crawlers used in web-indexing projects (google, duckduckgo, baidu, Apple Siri). You dislike this not because it could be defined as invasive (it's not), or because it could DoS websites (it won't). You dislike this because it's done by the government. The gov spending money on this endeavour hardly bleeds the coffers dry nor does it prevent investment in other sectors. This kind of radical, tech-first thinking is the kind of thing we should appluad the governments IT service for doing, because not too long ago there was virtually no innovation, anything tech related was offloaded to incompetent contractors such as Accenture and Deloitte. In fact you're contradicting yourself in multiple ways. > "[should have spent money on] public education.": this can be defined as public education. > "increase security staff compensation": as noted, not too long ago lots of this work was delegated to contractors. This is a step in the right direction and soon we can hope the compensation will increase. > "increase their own security education": have you got a source which states software engineers working for the gov aren't educating themselves? > "That is it? So... One gal looks at in and says, yep, fire up the guns!": What were you expecting, a full panel of industry experts scrutinising the code followed up with a parliamentary committee? This is called a peer code review, a rather simple process which you'll find at any tech firm.