Ridiculous Movie Device - "I Want to Know Everything About This Guy"

Every time a top-secret Government agency is after a civilian in a movie, the evil head of the agency always demands the same information:


"I want to know everything about this guy, where he eats, where he sleeps, what the name of his kindergarten teacher was."


The agency head then proceeds to run around telling all his geeks that he needs it sooner and faster but never actually does anything himself aside from brooding in the back of the dimly lit control room.


Why do these guys always need to know such random information?  Shouldn't they focus on more relevant information like bank accounts, military records, known aliases and the like? Say I'm an "enemy of the state" and I'm trying to evade some corrupt rogue NSA contingent so I can expose their transgressions.  Is it really important that they know who my kindergarten teacher was?  Presumably they would also want to know the names of all my teachers then right?  What kind of game-breaking information do they expect to gain here?  Also, isn't this all top-secret?  Do we really want to involve some innocent grade school teacher?  Think about how many more people these guys then have to kill at the end of the movie during the "tie up all loose ends" montage.


I'll tell you who I really feel bad for.  It's the first year analyst to has to scrape up this useless information.  Where does one even start?  Do they cold call the teachers?  How does that conversation even go?


"Ms. Smith, this is Bob Johnson, I'm calling from the, uh, department of shipping and logistics, did you ever teach a student named Ralph Simmons, looks kind of like Will Smith now?"


"Why yes, I think so, if memory serves correctly he was the best finger painter I ever had"


"Thank you for the information ma'am, has he by any chance contacted you in the last 36 hours?"


"Why no, in fact the last time I saw him I—" (phone call ends)


What does Bob Johnson do now?  Does he tell his boss to be on the lookout for some quality finger painting?  Think how frustrated a guy like Johnson is.  He probably graduated top of his class at MIT or Cal-Tech and got a great job working for the CIA doing top-secret surveillance thinking he'd be operating satellites and monitoring terrorist sleeper cells. Meanwhile, here he is now, mixed up in some illegal black-ops project which he'll probably be indicted for, and he's looking through high school year books trying to get in touch with a retired math teacher.  No wonder our defense budget costs trillions every year.  We're paying CIA analysts to work up detailed top-secret Facebook profiles on innocent people.


For once, can the agency head just say "I want to know anything that can help us catch this guy."  Maybe if he allocated his resources better, the situation wouldn't be out of control in the first place.


PS - there is no way these secret control rooms look cool and sleek with awesome glass doors, nice furniture and thousands of flat screens.  Dollars are scarce in the Government, I'll bet it looks more like the post office.