QOTD: Emptywheel

[U]ltimately, there is a limit, both financial and societal, to how much the country is willing to spend on investigative resources. So every demand that FBI take 6 hours rather than 4 in investigating 1,500 potential leads a day is also a demand that FBI shift resources from somewhere else.

And this navel-gazing, following every successful or near-miss attack, only serves to obscure the issue. We, as a society, have chosen to pursue gun crimes exclusively “post-boom.” We have chosen to let financial criminals that have done far more damage than terrorism — at least in financial terms (though their crimes do have physical repercussions as well) — scot free. That may in fact be the outcome our country — or certainly the elites angling for political contributions — might want. But at the very least, we as a society need to be explicit that the choice has been made, not just to invest billions in surveillance technologies that affect us all, but to treat two brothers and their pressure cooker bombs as a far more heinous crime than school kids being gunned down in their classrooms or struggling families having their homes stolen by the million.

The “Find Every Terrorist at Any Cost Industry” is also, whether they acknowledge it or not, the “Let gunmen and banksters go free” industry.