I don't necessarily disagree, it doesn't bother me nearly as much as it does a lot of people on here. However, we had actionable intelligence about 9-11 well i

I don't necessarily disagree, it doesn't bother me nearly as much as it does a lot of people on here. However, we had actionable intelligence about 9-11 well in advance of the attacks, and yet there were simply too many threats for us to identify this one as plausible. On the one hand this was failure of analysis. On the other hand, as the 9-11 commission concluded, there was a failure of imagination: for some reason no one took this type of threat that seriously, even though similar scenarios had been proposed by analysts before. My question, then, is how are orders of magnitude more data going to help? I honestly think it will make our predictive power worse, not better, at least for decades to come until we have learned enough to start making sense of data on the scale we are talking about here. It is really just a case of doing it because our technology will allow it, and a general hand-waving of "more is better" and "it will make everyone safer", than facing the reality of actually detecting a terrorist threat. It is, in fact, just more security theater.