Replace "terrorism" with "killer robots" or "sharks" or "bedbugs". Your statement remains as valid as ever, but somehow the government is only spending billions (or trillions) on one of them. Why?

The NSA does a lot more than just fight terrorism and of course the US invests a huge amount of money in mitigating the impact of other risks like natural disasters. They have to look at all these different threats and divvy up the money accordingly.

Conversely, a lot of US government organizations are involved in fighting terrorism besides the NSA.

None of this answers my question: of all these possibilities, why does the government only go after one?

You speak as if the government doesn't have programs that track sharks or bedbugs.

Sure, but there's a point where the government could go too far. For example, if the government starting having random mattress inspections inside peoples homes that would be way too intrusive despite any reductions in bedbugs that might result.

You speak as if he thinks the government should have no programs to track terrorists.

It seems pretty clear to me that it is the magnitude of resources devoted that concerns him (and myself).

Not of any substantial size, and not because of the possibility that they'll suddenly kill us all.

Don't know about the latter two, but they aren't worrying about the former because they own almost all of the killer robots.

This is so intentionally obtuse that I'm not sure what to say. Let me know when bedbugs conspire with sharks to fly a plane into a building.

I think a great case can be made for the NSA and other agencies spending too much money "fighting terrorism," but there's no reason to hurt that argument with such an absurd stance.

"No one knows how many lives bedbugs will claim in the next decade. The government does have to plan for the worst case scenario."

The above is nuts, right? Yet both bedbugs and terrorists account for a negligible number of American deaths historically. So the above can't be nuts if the equivalent statement about terrorism is non-nuts.

Please explain where I'm wrong, and don't just say I'm "intentionally obtuse".

The United States has experienced large scale terrorist acts(9/11) and has stopped other terrorist plots since then. Terrorism has claimed significantly more lives than bedbugs, and has also cause tremendous damage to United States infrastructure. I'd also argue that comparing the deaths of folks involved in 9/11 to the deaths that have(n't) been experienced by bedbugs to be both absurd and disrespectful, but that's beside the point.

It's hard for me to believe that you're actually trying to make this argument.

To several significant figures, American deaths from both terrorism and bedbugs are 0% of total American deaths.

Tremendous damage to United States infrastructure? What are you talking about? Those buildings damaged and destroyed in downtown Manhattan? Yes, billions of dollars in damage, but way down in the noise in the economy overall. Congress causes more financial damage in a night of gridlock than that.

It's hard for you to believe? Well, believe it. I am making the argument. We react far too hard to terrorism, by several orders of magnitude. It's basically an allergic reaction. The story of terrorism and the US over the past decade and change is pretty much the story of a bee and a person with a bee allergy. Essentially all of the damage is done by the massive overreaction to the sting, not the by the bee. The difference is that we can, at least in theory, simply choose to stop being allergic. The problem won't be solved by overreacting even more.

> Terrorism has claimed significantly more lives than bedbugs

On the scale of deaths overall-- no, it hasn't. That's the point.

>and has stopped other terrorist plots since then.

No it hasn't, not a single one. Every single case they've "stopped" was simple entrapment of mentally unstable people. If they'd left those people alone nothing would have ever happened.

Bedbug deaths presumably don't follow a power-law distribution.

> The government does have to plan for the worst case scenario.

No more so than the government needs to consider all other scenarios, and the costs of any policy choice in those scenarios, and use the likelihood along with the potential costs and benefits of each scenario in assessing the desirability of the policy.

Otherwise, planning for the worst case scenario just becomes a convenient excuse for policies that make life considerably worse for everyone in the most likely scenario.

That doesn't make much sense. What's the objective? If it IS saving lives, then a lot less money than the NSA burns up can be spent saving a lot more drug addicts, cancer sufferers, typhoid, HIV, and so on - there are millions more deaths than those caused by terrorism - no matter how unquantifiable those are.

Deaths from terror attacks follow a power law distribution. There is literally no such thing as a worst-case scenario. For any "justifiable" spend or effort on preventing attacks, you can guarantee that there will be an attack coming along which will justify spending more.