Bureaucratic Incompetence

[Elle]

For a long time I lived under the delusion that people in certain jobs were very effective, and that some kind of backup or failsafe mechanisms were in place to guard against expected human error. The older I get, the more I realize this is completely untrue. Cases like the recent NYC bombing make this so unpleasantly clear. Here you have a guy whose own father purportedly warned the FBI about. You have a guy whose suspicious travels and activities should have raised alarm bells like crazy. We have a systematic, legalized domestic spying operation going on at all times now. So we are all giving up our civil liberties - and this is to say nothing of what we've done with habeas corpus - in order to be "protected", yet even in the most egregious cases it appears we aren't being protected! I realize we don't hear about the successes, thankfully, because maybe someone with an evil intent is thwarted. But how is it possible that people can plead with the FBI to investigate a very suspicious person and nothing happens, and then he does this? If I'm going to be spied on, damn it, which is NOT ok with me, I expect some kind of return on it. Instead, it seems like after fifteen years of scrambling for better security and amazing investment of resources, we have the same problem of basic bureaucratic ineffectiveness we always had.

[akiva]

Those NSA guys were too busy spying on their spouses/significant others.

Seriously. This was a thing--so much so that someone coined a term for it. Wish I could remember the term--something like "Love Intel."

[Mike]

True Lies.