Originally Posted by Djlawman
Hmmm. Let's see, instead of manning security checkpoints at a few hundred airports in the U.S., we could put enough operatives into the field to try to figure out what hundreds of millions (if not billions) of other people around the world are thinking and doing, and thereby KNOW that we can stop them all before they try to do anything harmful.
It's why we have the CIA.
And when our government tries to do things concentrating on human intelligence like study patterns of calls from questionable overseas numbers, and listen to sat/radio transmissions involving overseas calls involving risky areas [i.e., calls to U.S. from hotbeds of terrorist activities], the civil libertarians again get up in arms, contending that rights are being violated.
If the calls are entirely overseas on both end, there's no issue.
If one of the terminating points is in the US and there's enough of a reason to monitor it, there's enough of a reason to get a FISA warrant.
How do you suggest we effectively concentrate on human intelligence? Even on just the foreign visitors in the U.S.? In the year 2000, there were 50 million visitors to the U.S. How do we investigate them on the "human intelligence" side to determine their likelihood of causing harm? And that's just the visitors. Doesn't include aliens living here. And sure does not include any kind of human intelligence on foreigners in their own countries who might have terroristic intentions.
So, just how do we EFFECTIVELY concentrate on human intelligence, instead of security screening? And how is it possibly going to cost LESS than the current program of security screening at airports?
Inquiring minds want to know.
You try to make it seem like you can only have one, but not both.
HUMINT and other intelligence resources are finite. Most of what's collected is garbage anyway. There are targeted entities and targeted people and you develop leads off of that. Beyond that, it's classified and I can't tell you more than that (and no, I'm not kidding, I did work in this field).
So 99.9% of the people entering the US aren't going to be a threat.
You concentrate on what are the biggest threats and go from there. Stuff gets prioritized due to limited resourses. Risk management, not risk avoidance is practiced. Intelligence agencies do it. I don't know why TSA can't. And especially with what's going on in Iraq, Afghanistan and other areas where troops are deployed and people really ARE dying, these agencies still practice risk management. While every life lost is tragic, they focus on the largest threats to the troops safety and go from there.