Illustration by Tom Bachtell

In Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi masterpiece “Minority Report,” set in the year 2054 and released nine months after the attacks of September 11, 2001, homicide-squad detectives no longer spend their time tracking down people who have committed murder. Instead, they go after people who are about to commit murder, swooping down to stop them in the nick of time. Spielberg’s police officers don’t fight crime, they fight “Pre-Crime.” They don’t catch killers, they catch pre-killers.

The enormous anti-terror establishment that the United States has created in the years since 9/11 has a similar purpose. Its vast, sprawling, expensive array of governmental, quasi-governmental, and nominally private institutions and their tools—high tech, like ubiquitous surveillance cameras, satellites, wiretaps, computer algorithms, facial-recognition software, drones, and data collection and analysis on a global scale; lower tech, like networks of agents, bags of cash, and airport security checkpoints—are designed primarily to stop acts of terrorism before they happen. That turns out to be a good deal more difficult than investigating such an act once it occurs.

Or so it appears, judging from the contrast between the total unexpectedness of the Boston Marathon bombings, on April 15th, and the stunning speed with which the alleged (and there’s no reason to doubt the accuracy of the allegation) perpetrators were identified. Seventy-four hours after the carnage, we saw their pictures; eight hours after that, one was dead; six hours after that, we learned their names and perused their tweets and YouTube favorites; twelve hours after that, on the night of the fifth day, the second was in custody. To be sure, it was mainly traditional police work that solved the crime and cornered the criminals. But key clues—including two surveillance-camera images, culled from thousands, that were eventually found to be of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev—were unearthed with the help of an all-pervasive, largely terror-sired security technosphere.

It stands to reason that the data-surveillance establishment would be better at after-the-fact investigation than at before-the-fact prevention. Think of it as a kind of pyramidal decision tree, with a particular terror attack, in either the known past or the unknown future, at the apex and, across the base, the more than three-quarters of a million names on the government’s Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment list. It’s easier to track a path downward than upward. From the apex down, choices are fewer. Clues connect. In the other direction, the number of possible routes to the top, from every name up to every hypothetical outcome, climb exponentially toward the infinite.

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Unlike the cops in Spielberg’s movie, the bureaucratic empire charged with predicting and preëmpting the next terror attack cannot rely on the dreamlike visions of a trio of psychic “Pre-Cogs” suspended in a flotation tank. When the Washington Post surveyed that empire, in 2010, it counted more than three thousand government organizations and associated private companies working on counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence, in ten thousand locations across the United States. More than eight hundred and fifty thousand people held top-secret security clearances. Three years later, the complex is still growing. This fall, the National Security Agency, the largest and most opaque component of the counterterrorism behemoth, will cut the ribbon on a billion-dollar facility called the Utah Data Center, near Bluffdale. The center, reportedly, will gobble up a galaxy of intercepted telecommunications. According to a rough estimate by Digital Fourth, an advocacy group based in Massachusetts, each of the Utah Data Center’s two hundred (at most) professionals will be responsible for reviewing five hundred billion terabytes of information each year, the equivalent of twenty-three million years’ worth of Blu-ray DVDs. Even if the guess is off by a few orders of magnitude, that’s a lot of overtime.

It also represents a lot of potential for abuse. Interviewed by James Bamford, of Wired, a former senior N.S.A. official named William Binney put his thumb and forefinger close together and said, “We are, like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state.” For the foreseeable future, in this country, anyway, that’s more a technical possibility than a political likelihood. But, as noted, the future is hard to foresee. One shudders to imagine the mischief that some budding J. Edgar Hoover, now playing Call of Duty on his iPad after school, might one day make with the assets of the Utah Data Center.

The mismatch between the Himalayan haystacks of data and the limitations of the human beings trying to find the needles and read them like tea leaves is matched by the mismatch between the data-surveillance state and the panel charged with taming it. The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board has four part-time members and, as yet, no permanent staff. Until last year, it hadn’t had a meeting in five years. President Obama picked a chairman, David Medine, a year and a half ago, but Senate confirmation didn’t come until last week. (Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, had helped block it, because, he said, Medine had refused to answer a question about whether we’re engaged in a “war on terrorism” with a simple yes or no. Instead, Grassley complained, “he opted for a more limited answer that military power is permissible in appropriate cases.”) The oversight board is independent and has subpoena power. But its resources are likely to be so feeble that, according to the Federation of American Scientists, it may be, at best, “a boutique oversight shop that tackles a couple of discrete policy issues each year.”

In the United States since 9/11, Islamist terrorism has resulted in the deaths of thirty-seven people. During the same period, ten thousand times that many have been killed by guns wielded by their countrymen or themselves. These figures can be seen as a sign of misplaced priorities, but they are also evidence of the effectiveness of the surveillance state. The failures of counterterrorism are always public. Its successes are often unknown and sometimes unknowable—no one can say how many attacks by Al Qaeda and the like have been quietly derailed or headed off, or simply deterred by American anti-terrorism’s reputation for omniscience—but they are real.

In Boston, as Richard Clarke, the former National Security Council official whose urgent warnings the Bush White House brushed aside on the eve of 9/11, notes, a couple of young misfits used pressure cookers, fireworks, and Internet recipes to kill and maim, put a major city under lockdown, monopolize the news, and seize the attention of the President of the United States. By suicide-bomber standards, at least, it was a success—enough of one, perhaps, to encourage imitations. If the pattern of terrorism is changing, however, so is the public’s response. Polls taken in Boston’s aftermath suggest that, while the share of Americans who judge further such attacks to be likelier has grown, fewer live in dread of them. In the latest Fox News survey, respondents were asked, “Would you be willing to give up some of your personal freedom in order to reduce the threat of terrorism?” For the first time since 9/11, more of those polled said no than said yes. Terrorism remains a grave and constant threat. But, for the moment, fear is the minority report. ♦