paragraph: (CNN) -- Since the bombing of the Boston marathon -- in which three people, including a child, were killed and more than 200 injured -- attention has naturally focused on what could have been done to prevent it. Some, such as Rep. Peter King, the New York Republican who chairs the Homeland Security Committee, have argued for increased surveillance of Muslims in the United States. Local police departments "have to realize that the threat is coming from the Muslim community and increase surveillance there," he says. Others have asked whether leads were properly followed and if better sharing of information between agencies would have helped thwart the bombing. However, the government, with its $40 billion annual intelligence budget, already amasses vast quantities of information on the private lives of Muslims in the United States. The FBI has 3,000 intelligence analysts working on counterterrorism and 15,000 paid informants, according to Mother Jones. Exactly how many of them are focused on Muslims in the United States is unknown; there is little transparency in this area. But, given the emphasis the FBI has placed on preventing Muslim terrorism, and based on my interviews with FBI agents working on counterterrorism, there could be as many as two-thirds assigned to spying on Muslims. Taking the usual estimate of the Muslim population in the United States of 2.35 million, this would mean the FBI has a spy for every 200 Muslims in the United States. When one adds the resources of the National Security Agency, regional intelligence fusion centers, and the counterterrorism work of local police departments, such as the New York Police Department (where a thousand officers are said to work on counterterrorism and intelligence), the number of spies per Muslim may increase dramatically. East Germany's communist-era secret police, the Stasi, had one intelligence analyst or informant for every 66 citizens. This suggests that Muslims in the United States could be approaching levels of state surveillance similar to that which the East German population faced from the Stasi. Yet, as the Stasi itself eventually discovered, no system of surveillance can ever produce total knowledge of a population. Indeed, the greater the amount of information collected, the harder it is to interpret its meaning. In the majority of terrorist attacks in recent years, the relevant information was somewhere in the government's systems, but its significance was lost amid a morass of useless data. What is obscured by the demands for ever greater surveillance and information processing is that security is best established through relationships of trust and inclusion within the community. The real missed opportunity to intervene before the bombs went off in Boston likely came three months earlier, when bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev stood up during a Friday prayer service at his mosque - the Islamic Society of Boston, in Cambridge - to angrily protest the imam's sermon. The imam had been celebrating the life of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., which Tsarnaev thought was selling out. 
question: Are the Muslims being scrutinized?
answer: There is a spy for every 200 Muslims