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Nothing gets me more suspicious of an official account of a high profile event than “oops our recording don’t exist.” I don’t know enough to comment about the reports of multiple gunshots from multiple locations, and how to tell what is and isn’t the USSS firing back. But it seems like even if it’s not policy, there’s really so much to be gained and so little to lose in forensics investigations by having those recordings that not having them at all would be a red flag that there is something on those records that they don’t want the public to know.
You're not wrong, but having the foresight to actively setup recording is something non-obvious that may have been overlooked, or even not part of the standard procedure. Do they have a history of recording, and only this one is absent (see the Watergate tapes)? On the other hand, I could point to NASA where "lock the doors" is a planned procedure where in case of incident nobody leaves without a full debrief, and no data wanders off to be missing later.
Given that (publicly known) security incidents under USSS supervision are rare (when was the last one?), perhaps they've not spent much time on post-incident data retention procedures. At a bare minimum, this seems like a good time to demand these changes (recordings, debriefings) after incidents going forward.
I don’t think, “record everything so we can do a post-event follow-up” is an obscure thing. Virtually every form of decision making or security insists on keeping logs and records of everything that’s going on. I could go to any IT department in any company in the country and there will be logs of everything done on the servers. But somehow people protecting Trump just sort of forgot something that every company and police department drills into new hires. At some point “I didn’t think about recording data or keeping it,” seems less like an explanation and more like an excuse.
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