RICHARD FERNANDEZ: The House Of The Usher.

The Secret Service ‘failed’ president Obama just as the intelligence agencies ‘failed’ to warn him about ISIS. The data explosion has the downside of flooding us with alarms. On any given day a thousand indicators cross a certain threshold. Then they cry “wolf” but not all of them are true, urgent cries for help. Still one of them — Murphy guarantees it — eventually may well be.

The way bureaucracies deal with this problem is to put a man in loop to check if the wolf is there. The amount of information that the US military processes is staggering. The news watching public could be forgiven for thinking that the administration’s drone warfare requires nothing more than a hi-tech model airplane, a satellite and a bunch of teenagers operating a glorified game console. In reality it requires 268 people to operate each drone.

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