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Are you saying that the U.S. has more than ~300 people overseas actively working on terror plots at any given time? You can't represent cost:threat ratio as do
by mpyne 13y ago
Are you saying that the U.S. has more than ~300 people overseas actively working on terror plots at any given time?
You can't represent cost:threat ratio as dollars per person tracked. The major reason for why the program exists is to detect and break-up one-off major terrorist plots so even if the NSA was detecting all worldwide terror plans against the U.S. the number of people they were tracking would never be very high.
This is what all the people saying that the risk of dying from terrorism is so completely low have been reminding us, remember?
- comefrom10 13y agoPerhaps if the US government wants to protect us from terrorism it should stop acting like a terrorist organization abroad.
- mpyne 13y agoWhat was the excuse for 9/11 then? I seem to recall it was nothing more "terroristic" than having U.S. forces deployed in Saudi Arabia, at the request of that nation. But let me guess, victim blaming is OK, as long as the victims are Americans?
- comefrom10 13y agoI didn't blame victims in that post. Perhaps I should be more certain about what the US is doing abroad before saying what I said, but I have gotten the impression that the US government's track record has been less than stellar, e.g. Operation Ajax.
- tomrod 13y ago> You can't represent cost:threat ratio as dollars per person tracked Sure you can. If you're only using the program to track 300 people, the average cost is the total cost divided by 300. As you point out, there is a very small risk of dying from a terrorist plot is low. So if we're spending so much money and only tracking 300 people, there is clearly a problem.