So we had to develop technologies like this to barely manag…

We've seen and struggled in civil conflicts with instant, local, universal, distributed communications (cell phone era, basically every conflict since 2000). We've seen and struggled in conflicts with instant, global, universal distributed communications (everything since 2011).

The world's most overfunded military and glow in the dark agencies struggle and largely fail to contain conflicts where fhe vast, vast majority of people are locked into a ~5mi radius of their home.

How can they possibly contain a conflict in a nation with universal car ownership and the most developed road network in the world? The average car can travel over 400 miles on one tank of gas, how can you contain the potential of that kind of mobility?

I think that's partially why the system was so freaked out by 1/6. Yes, most of it is histrionics but you don't decide to indefinitely turn your capital into the Baghdad Green Zone with fortifications and 25k troops over histrionics alone.

Yes, I get that most people flew but over 1 million showed up to a mostly spontaneously organized event on a week's notice.

I think the elite consensus went from "lol, 1% of the disenfranchised populace believes 'crazy' internet stuff" to "oh shit, that's a million people within an 8 hour drive of D.C."

The scariest part for them was the fact that Qoomers and MAGAboomers were able to mobilize faster than the National Guard could. Spontaneous organization within the security apparatus' OODA loop panic attack inducing for them.

The thing to remember about all this surveillance technology too is that even if a drone is capable of tracking "30,000 targets at once" that's basically the average traffic flow in the average business district, it's a pittance on the grand scale.

It's great it's able to pinpoint the one goober stupid enough to do a meetup in an empty parking lot like its the 1970s but the volumes and sorts of traffic activity in the US make this unworkable.

Hell, if they deployed such systems universally they might accidentally win The War on Drugs. There's probably 3 dozen Plug Men driving around in the exact manner that would trigger such a system at any given time in any major city.

Add to that the fact that Baghdad and Kabul don't have a dozen different plumbing companies with a dozen trucks each rolling out in random patterns each day. They also don't have fast food drive throughs that serve over a thousand customers each lunch rush.

Have you seen how filthy public spaces like McDonald's parking lots are these days? You can run a national dead-drop network just acting like your average lumpenprolr and throwing you Big Mac container (with identifying mark) within 5 feet of the trash like everyone else.