Have you ever heard of the name "Edward Snowden"?
What everybody is doing is already literally being watched all the time and it has been that way or at least decades and has gotten worse with technological evolution.
So, to evaluate action at t=0, we compare some metric at the real t=1 against the counterfactual at t=1.
It is logically invalid to evaluate the efficacy of an action by only comparing the metric at t=0 and t=1. That kind of reasoning error is incredibly common.
I didn’t suggest that this is necessary. It seems like there should be enough resources to look into the construction standards of a tourism company based in the U.S. that has received international press coverage for several years. It is possible to stop a tourism company from operating. This wasn’t a secret deep sea dive that no one could halt - it was the latest in a series of commercial voyages that were covered in the press (a BBC reporter went on one a few years ago, and there is a video tour of the vehicle). This dive was publicly announced.
No one needs to be surveilled 24/7 for regulations to work.
I believe that the GP’s point is that there’s no omniscient agency that can preemptively stop people from doing stupid things. There’s not enough resources to watch everything that everybody is doing all the time.