Because the price of freedom is eternal targeted slaughter:
“NSA threw the kitchen sink at the FATA,” said a former U.S. intelligence official with experience in Afghanistan and Pakistan, referring to the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, the region in northwest Pakistan where al-Qaeda’s leadership is based.NSA employees rarely ventured beyond the security gates of the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, officials said. Surveillance operations that required placing a device or sensor near an al-Qaeda compound were handled by the CIA’s Information Operations Center, which specializes in high-tech devices and “close-in” surveillance work.
“But if you wanted huge coverage of the FATA, NSA had 10 times the manpower, 20 times the budget and 100 times the brainpower,” the former intelligence official said, comparing the surveillance resources of the NSA to the smaller capabilities of the agency's IOC. The two agencies are the largest in the U.S. intelligence community, with budgets last year of $14.7 billion for the CIA and $10.8 billion for the NSA. “We provided the map,” the former official said, “and they just filled in the pieces.”
As opposed to, oh I dunno, throwing the kitchen sink at poverty in America instead. Okay, assuming that this isn't self-serving bullshit, and that some of these people actually do know how to perform their jobs, you would think that sooner or later, our elected leaders would question the utility/desirability of a computerized killing regime that only creates more enemies for the computerized killing regime to target for killing so it can create more enemies to keep killing. Not to minimize whatever threats we face, but there are so many other things we could spending the money on!
---Baron V