Surveillance society

Sometimes – for all the talk about surveillance, one reads something that is simply astounding. Take for example this – in the course of a Fred Kaplan piece on what sort of a President Clinton might be in relation to foreign policy (précis: anxiety inducing more than likely). He writes about her proposals for an ‘intelligence surge’ in response to the Orlando shootings…

…upping the budgets of intelligence and law enforcement agencies, improving their coordination on a local and federal level, working with Silicon Valley to track and analyze jihadist recruiters on social media networks, and working with responsible leaders in Muslim neighborhoods (rather than alienating them by suggesting—as Trump did, in his speech on the same day—that all American Muslims are somehow complicit in the actions of extremists).

But, check this out:

Some of these proposals are new, especially the “intelligence surge,” and seem tailored to the evolving domestic threats. It’s true, as Politico recently reported, that the FBI has enough agents to track just 48 suspected terrorists in the U.S., 24/7, at any one time. But it may also be true that, in order to find and relentlessly pursue possible “lone-wolf” terrorists (those with no direct connections to jihadist organizations), the FBI would have to change its nature from a law enforcement bureau to a domestic intelligence agency, with broad powers going beyond the restrictions of prosecutorial probes. Is that a path we want to go down? Does Clinton want to pave that path? It’s unclear.

Just 48 suspects at any one time? And yet it makes sense when one thinks about it. One needs to have massive resources of people and materials in order to mount a blanket surveillance operation.