I don't think I could facepalm any harder. What you are basically stipulating is that because pursuing certain leads could be almost always wrong that this would prevent a government department from following up on them? Are you kidding me?
Nothing you do with a filter changes the base rate of terrorist plots, which is extremely low.
In that case, I imagine the base rate of 'post-successful terrorist act plotting' is higher than 'pre-successful terrorist act plotting,' which would eliminate your argument.
Also, what you would be studying is the TYPE of terrorist activity not total plot numbers e.g. the stages of activity. If a successful terrorist attack was pulled off not to long ago in the past then that would call for an increase in the base rate of the TYPE of plotting. More terrorists would be more invigorated to pursue/look into similar methods as their next plot.
Maybe the cross-section of the plotting-type-pivot is what you could match against?
The simplest way to express my facepalm is: you are tremendously oversimplifying things.
Surely any increase in wannabe-copycat terrorists Googling for items used in recent terrorist attacks would be more than cancelled out by a much larger proportional increase in the much larger group of people that follow the news and don't want to be terrorists also Googling for items used in recent attacks
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I don't think I could facepalm any harder. What you are basically stipulating is that because pursuing certain leads could be almost always wrong that this would prevent a government department from following up on them? Are you kidding me?
In that case, I imagine the base rate of 'post-successful terrorist act plotting' is higher than 'pre-successful terrorist act plotting,' which would eliminate your argument.
Also, what you would be studying is the TYPE of terrorist activity not total plot numbers e.g. the stages of activity. If a successful terrorist attack was pulled off not to long ago in the past then that would call for an increase in the base rate of the TYPE of plotting. More terrorists would be more invigorated to pursue/look into similar methods as their next plot.
Maybe the cross-section of the plotting-type-pivot is what you could match against?
The simplest way to express my facepalm is: you are tremendously oversimplifying things.
Surely any increase in wannabe-copycat terrorists Googling for items used in recent terrorist attacks would be more than cancelled out by a much larger proportional increase in the much larger group of people that follow the news and don't want to be terrorists also Googling for items used in recent attacks