On Fri, 15 Mar 2019 21:10:46 +1300, I wrote:

I hope we learn the right lessons from others who have been here before us, and not repeat too many of their mistakes.

And here goes one of them <https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12216367>: If our spies were able to carry out mass surveillance, would the alleged mosque murderer have been stopped? It's a question raised by National leader Simon Bridges and one which has been dismissed by those with expertise in security intelligence. But that’s not stopping him from saying: "But we can say with the significantly heightened risks we face today than we realised, it would make us safer." At least some people realize that merely collecting more information isn’t really very helpful. Dr Rhys Ball, formerly of the NZSIS, says: "If you want to, you can collect everything that is in the aether tomorrow if you were going to invest the resource to do so ... The downside is, how do you process that? I'm not aware of the Batcomputer being invented yet." Nice to see a fairly evenhanded report on the issue, that does not uncritically assume that surveilling people en masse will catch the crims.