Most of the things he mentions are very cheap to pull off, though. Proxy honeypots, sniffing ISP internet connections, querying IPs, email surveillance -- the infrastructure is already in place they just have to type some commands. Cost: $0.
On the other hand, actions that require actually sending men in suits and vans filled surveillance equipment can be costly. If they're doing that, you know you're in big trouble.
Most of the things he mentions are very cheap to pull off, though. Proxy honeypots, sniffing ISP internet connections, querying IPs, email surveillance -- the infrastructure is already in place they just have to type some commands. Cost: $0.
I'm sorry but I have to jump in here - you're writing off an awful lost of resources under the banner of "they just have to type some commands."
I'm sorry you had to take that literal, I was just figuratively speaking.
My point is that it is the human part of surveillance that is costly. For everything that can be collected automatically with systems already in place (even though placing those systems could have been very expensive), the threshold to use it is very low. When the information is collected and processed, what rests is only database queries. "automatic surveillance" is (comparatively) cheap.
In contrast, "expensive surveillance" is placing monitoring equipment in a house, parking some fan sneakily around the block to listen in, and such. It's labour and resource intensive.
If you can't point to budget appropriation, then at least point to some kind of reference to "they just sit and enter few commands and spy on you". There are definitely sophisticated surveillance programs out there, but notion that they track everything is just too tinfoil for me, sorry.
If it was really only about getting Osama Bin Laden, then we would probably have him by now. It was really about attacking a group (Al Qaeda, Taliban) and looking strong in the face of 9/11 by striking back at someone (anyone).
