Well, yes, but the apocalypse and the Angel wars reset the concern scale. Nobody's going to be focusing on border security when the likely threat is expected to be six stories tall, shaped like What The Holy FUCK Is That, and visible from a half mile away at all hours.

>
>Then again, their progress through the information age does appear to
>have been arrested somewhat as well. The technology to hit the face of
>everyone with a high-fidelity camera and do recognition matching, as
>well as to link every podunk border post to a central database of
>wanted assholes, may just flat out not exist.
>

The classic problem of writing about the future; it's virtually impossible to get it right without being more vague about dates. You'll notice we don't have AT fields or artificial Angel hearts, in spite of Neon Genesis Evangelion's being dated roughly around this time.

NXE wasn't written as "NGE with updated tech," as much as it was "NGE with additional fictional tech," so expecting realistic technology predictions out of it seems a little on the nitpicky side.

>
>NXE was written at a weird time, set in a weird time,
>and we here in the real world have reached another, different
>kind of weird time.
>

Yes, indeed. So the expectation that our weirdness should automatically paste into NXE's weirdness, when the story was written according to a timetable it didn't create, and written twelve years before the fictional events would have started...more than a little weird.

Peter Eng
--
At least we aren't arguing about the pretzel sticks.