Another terrorist attack occurs, this time in Oceania, a neighbouring country. Oceania’s police service tells Eurasian police that terrorists had planned the attack using Oceanian and Eurasian telephone services. However, laws prevent Oceanian police services from ‘spying’ on Oceanian people and Eurasian police cannot ‘spy’ on Eurasians for the same reason. A meeting is arranged between the two forces, here are the minutes:

Oceanian police: “We need to step up our game fellas, too many folks are being attacked by terrorists.”

Eurasian police: “You’re right, but we’re having some legal trouble at our end that’s stopping us from foreseeing crimes like this. We’ve got a pretty tight net but extremists are still slipping through.”

Oceanian police: “We hear you loud and clear, we’ve got an even worse system here — all we want to do is collect all criminal communications but the politicians are getting in the way. How are we supposed to find the needles if we don’t have the whole haystack?”

Eurasian police: “We’re doing our best, but hold on now — there are no legal restrictions on collecting terrorist communications from foreign states — what about a partnership? We’ll show you ours if you show us yours?”

Oceanian police: “That sounds like a plan — let us run this past our chief.”

Oceanian oversight commision: “It’ll prevent crime? Sounds fine.”

Oceanian police: “Ok, we’re good to go.”

Eurasian police: “Awesome, let’s start sharing the suspects then.”

Telephone call data is now collected from both Eurasian and Oceanian telephone services. Eurasian police and Oceanian police now share all communications data from their anti-terrorism efforts. They also bring into the partnership police services from three other states.

The Eurasian police provide the Oceanian’s list of terrorist suspects to the Eurasian postal service. The number of suspects now lists more than 1.2 million people, the postal service chiefs aren’t happy and a meeting is arranged:

Postal service: “This is too many people for us to manage — we can’t reroute this much mail without disrupting our service.”

Police: “We hear you, but I thought you wanted to prevent crime? We can’t help that there are this many bad people in the world, and the list is only going to get longer.”

Postal service: “Well surely there’s another solution? The problem is we don’t have the staff to deal with this much mail.”

Police: “Hmm, tricky. Well why don’t we lend a hand, if you really want to keep helping prevent terrorist attacks we can organise a team that will sort through all mail going through your service and we can make decisions on its importance. This will also prevent your staff infringing on your users’ privacy.”

Postal service: “That would be ideal, but won’t it mean that a lot of innocent people have their mail read?”

Police: “I suppose this is price of security. Besides, we’re not interested in innocent people — we’re only after the terrorists.”

A similar conversation occurs at the Oceanian postal service. Cameras and microphones are installed in hotel rooms across Eurasia in case terrorists stay in them in the future.