I'm wondering if the large scale data gathering (and I take your point about the organisation perhaps not being able to process all the data it has) is actually

I'm wondering if the large scale data gathering (and I take your point about the organisation perhaps not being able to process all the data it has) is actually detracting from more focused action on appropriate targets, i.e. actual enemies of the state who represent a real and present danger of death or injury? I've witnessed the assumptions that senior managers sometimes make in medium to large organisations that what they call 'IT' will somehow improve things or answer vital questions when in fact it is the observation of a business process with steps in detail that is needed to find the bottlenecks. Perhaps I'm being cynical but the 'selling' of large volume data collection (even if a lot of that data has no predictive value and remains static on the hard drives in the data centre) to the politicians might be seen as guaranteeing budget.