There have been plenty of boots on the ground in a couple of places in the last two decades and both are massive failures. In the meantime people of the western world share everything for free with everyone.
Ah, you mean like Stasi or Polish UB, or OMON. Your original answer seems to be missing a clarification on what boots you mean. Yeah, that might work in conjunction with a full on oppression system.
Were there no “intelligence boots on the ground” in the places I have mentioned?
This whole affair is about sigint, electronic signals monitoring in the hope that something worth of more intelligent processing pops out. This works, but the amount of funds required versus the amount of output given all of the sigint operations at work today is enormous before you start moving the needle.
It's the human intelligence gathering where these groups are deficient, but that doesn't scale, so just like the start-up investors the governments believe that they will be able to do this on the cheap by widening the net. But that won't work, it just means they'll catch a ton more krill, and very few extra fish.
