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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

We need a big budget cut in the "homeland security" area. All this interception is not paying off. The biggest "terrorist event" in the US since 2001 was the guy who shot up a gay nightclub in Orlando FL in 2017. That was a solo nutcase; there was no planning chatter to intercept. The Boston Marathon bombing was two brothers. The San Bernardino shooting was a husband and wife.

What's discouraging terrorism is the US's overreaction outside the US. It's become very clear to terrorist organizations that if they attack the US, the US is going to hit back, even if it's insanely expensive and causes collateral damage. The people in charge, and many people around them, end up dead.

Remember ISIS, the Islamic State? ISIS is down to 1.5 square miles, surrounded, and everybody but the most fanatical fighters is surrendering. The holdouts have days to live.

We don't need more Big Brother.

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I completely agree with you, but the counter argument is the only incidents that are getting through are the ones that are solo because the more complicated plots are getting intercepted and disrupted.

That's because people have hands and throats, weapons and weaknesses. You simply can't stop a killer operating at an animal level unless it's stopped while in progress. Stopping organized killing beforehand is however quite feasible, and society does have some responsibilities there.

> I completely agree with you, but the counter argument is the only incidents that are getting through are the ones that are solo because the more complicated plots are getting intercepted and disrupted.

The problem with this argument is that it can't justify continued spending because that would make it unfalsifiable. We need to spend $450B/year on a bear-repelling rocks because we currently pay for the rocks and there are no bears. And if any bears do appear then we obviously didn't have enough bear-repelling rocks and we need to start spending $900B/year.

If there is a real question as to whether the ~0 bears is a result of the rocks, it's time to cut the bear-repelling rock budget in half and see how many bears there are next year. If it's still ~0 then it didn't need to be as high as it was and it may still be too high.

The retention requirements needed by the enterprise consumers are not terrorism related.

Also, cutting the government's budget would not impact the cost of compliance to corporations.

The retention requirements for enterprises can be satisfied by transaction logging where the transactions are done. You don't need to break into TLS.

No it can't. We're literally talking about monitoring and capturing packets for data loss prevention, something that can't be done if the packets are encrypted.

So what would things look like if that homeland security spending was useful and needed? How do we know its okay to cut? Cut the programs and see if people start getting blown up?

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