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Right now, some poor fellow is out for a walk. A rarity. An odd one. Don't think the police don't know the habits of queer ducks like that, men who walk mornings for the hell of it, or for reasons of insomnia Anyway, the police have had him charted for months, years. Never know when that sort of information might be handy. And today, it turns out, it's very usable indeed. It saves face. Oh, God, look there!"

Great. So which is it?
1. As is expounded daily upon here and many other forums and sites, the police are inept and can never do a good job at anything.
or
2. When it suits the alarmists and conspiracists all of the sudden all the police in the USA turn into some sort of super-turbo-hyper perfect force where they do everything so magnificently that they work as a hive-mind and are to be feared in totality.

So it's either/or one of those because it can't be both and then have the same outcome of the conspiracy theories.

Then, of course, is the fact that there is the massive separation of cooperation between those (the boogiemen-in-black) who have all the petabytes of information on everyone, and the police forces of the USA whom have no perfect computer networks that work together agency-to-ageny nor state-to-state with some barely having interconnect-ability. Then also there's the fact that many police agencies are woefully behind modern standards for computing and information storage themselves.

Then, of course, there's the fact that things like Coast-to-Coast AM and a whole myriad of forums and websites exist full of alarmist and conspiracy theories of which none are forced off the air by the boogiemen-in-black and the people on the radio shows and tv shows and web forums don't mysteriously disappear. They continue to exist and broadcast.

The logic and practicality of such a vast conspiracy & the reality of what all the pieces have to do to become a whole, tells me that they're no closer to what the alarmists and conspiracists have been howling about than they were 100 years ago or 200 years ago.
The magnitude of what it would take to make all the pieces into a cohesive whole is infinitely impossible in the world we live in.

Which is it?

Right now we have a system that keeps the honest citizen under control, but can't do anything about a criminal.

Right now we have a system that can know how many times you buy Rice Crispies, but has no idea how much dope you smoke.

Right now we have a system that tracks every penny in your paycheck, but doesn't know anything about the cash payments an illegal alien gets, so it gives him/her food stamps, Section 8 housing and free medical care.

Right now we have a system that depends on a few things being tracked electronically, and most things tracked by people and little bits of paper.

As long as anything is tracked by people and their petty fiefdoms and file cabinets full of paper documents a person is relatively safe, unless they do something stupid to become a target.

Once electronic records, video cameras, and electronic monitoring of all forms of communications become pervasive, and all that data becomes searchable with a few key strokes, mouse clicks or gestures, no detail of anyone's life is private.

That passage I quoted is from Fahrenheit 451, set in just such a future.

So which is it?

Right now, it's mostly mass confusion, rank incompetence and selective enforcement or neglect. The criminal skates and the honest man gets screwed.

In the foreseeable future, it's every move is known or knowable, every petty crime an honest man commits is punished harshly, the ones in charge and their surrogates skate.

Today, speaking out is not a crime, but if you get a following, suddenly no potentially embarrassing detail of your life, from a drunk driving arrest as a college student to having a girl friend on the side is too small for public exposure and discussion.

In the foreseeable future a Dan Ra^ther will have unquestionably "authentic" documents for any crime real or imagined that an enemy of the state needs to be said to have committed.

And no one will dare question them.

So which is it?

Right now, we have no idea who is going to set of a bomb in a crowd.

But with a few blurry cell phone photos, within a mater of days, we can ID them and determine which terrorists they were associating with, which countries they visited, how many times they beat their wife, which countries warned us about them, what the warnings were, where they bought cooking supplies, building supplies, and their morning coffee.

Heck, a dozen years ago we could name all 19 hijackers before the flames were even out.

We still can't quite figure out what theses two incidents have in common, though...