The real problem is not the fact that we have places where pedestrians can be hit. It's the fact that there are people who would want to hurt innocent people for no reason. TBH I don't really understand why these crimes should be treated in any special way other than any other murder/assault crime. What difference does it make what ideology they are claimed to identify with? I am not convinced that the volume of such crimes (assault with relevant ideology) is enough to warrant putting them in a special category in the first place.
I do think that the bollard solution is a bit unnecessary though, as there'll always be a place where pedestrians would be vulnerable, and many other ways that people could be hurt besides.
At least it's something that could have an effect though. Snooping on emails would have almost no effect, and I hope everyone knows that. Snowden/William Binney, etc, should have made it patently obvious to everyone that there is no shortage of data flowing in, and I'm sure any successful preventative efforts would have been trumpeted to the rooftops with the way those agencies love to pat themselves on the back to justify bigger budgets.
More crap data, from millions of law-abiding innocent citizens, is not going to make it any easier for them to separate out the signal from the massive amount of noise.
The fact the media is not presenting real solutions to either of the actual problems - people being run down by cars or trucks, and people wanting to hurt other innocent people, or even questioning the imaginary solutions makes me strongly suspect there's ulterior motives at play.
To be quite blunt, this is such a blatant and transparent power grab by the authorities that I can't help but think that if the average person cannot see that our media is not interested in presenting the true story, with real facts that make sense, and our government representatives aren't addressing any of the real issues and just trying to remove our freedoms at every turn in order to not even solve imagined problems, then our society is already doomed, and not at the hands of terrorists.
