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Just a quiet conspiracy between everybody who had access to footage in what is, as OP put it, the most surveilled place in America.
Unless you think that every unsolved murder in Washington, D.C. is also such a conspiracy I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that it's quite possible to evade D.C.'s surveillance footage even if you don't have an inside person, and having one would make it even easier.
Frankly, that's all that needs to be said here. But I'm going to go further than that. Remember when I said
You're doing this here! "The government" and even "the FBI" doesn't have access to all of the footage from D.C.
There are going to be three types of cameras in Washington, D.C. - government, public, and private. Government cameras will be split between different agencies - no single agency will have custody of all of them. Public cameras are livestreaming on the internet. Private cameras' footage is not available to the government without a request.
This means that when the FBI-ATF team is put together to deal with the bomber, they don't have access to ~any of the relevant footage. They have to go around and get it: speak to other government agencies, knock on the doors of hotels and restaurants and ask if they have video surveillance footage, etc.
Now, I don't know how large the team working this is (it likely fluctuates based on the need) but my guess is that probably you have a small core team, plus subject-matter-experts and analysts that are tapped for specific tasks.
This means that the group of people who have access to the footage that is relevant to this event is possibly quite small! Call it an agent-in-charge, a six-man team, and about two dozen SMEs and analysts who are tapped with specific tasking at the discretion of the team lead.
And the minimum theoretical amount of people on that team that can gatekeep access to the video footage is...one. Potentially whichever agent raises his hand and says "I'll do it" when the lead agent asks who wants to go round up the video footage, that guy is your chokepoint. Any cameras he decides weren't rolling that day weren't, any livestreams that he decides to ignore are ignored, any footage that was regrettably scrubbed the day before he happened to knock on the door was scrubbed. As long as he doesn't get caught ignoring any obvious leads, what are the odds that someone double-checks his work? The Bureau isn't drowning in free time.
Now, I don't know how the FBI does things. I hope they have procedures in place that make this difficult or impossible. But I do know how research and analysis works. A single eye can blind the whole body.
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