Wait, I think we are lacking something here....
Since we are talking about White House or a big airport we are assuming as obvious that they are surely using the best technology available in the market... But sorry: where is it written?...
I think that first of all we should actually investigate about which specific product/technology we are talking about there, before making a generic "lawsuit" to the market of sensitive areas protection technologies....
Is it that impossible that on the contrary actually for some reasons they were just simply using a poor old technology (not necessarly low cost!...), maybe just motion-detection or IR based?.... You can't imagine how many times I saw with my eyes highly critical infrastructures or big famous airports "protected" by useless old stuff.... Don't make me write the names, you would be shocked!....
I don't want to say that there are today technologies with "0" false alarms: this will never happen by definition! But there are today timely reliable solutions available, with not only the ability to limitate the false alarms even in challenging environments but also and above all to reduce to almost zero the management cost of them. Because it's not only the number of false alarms the issue, but actually the main issue is how much each false alarm costs.
If I had for example a system giving only, for example, 1-2 false alarms per year, but its verification meant to need to stand up, to go and to see phisically, maybe far away, maybe without knowing a priori what it generated it (if a cat or a squad of dangerous criminals..), these false alarms would have an extremely high cost and of course I would need to reduce them to zero..
But if instead I have for example an efficient VMS giving to an operator the real-time screenshot of the alert, with a colored bounding box indicating clearly what generated the alert, the verification would be made in 1 second just rising the head on a monitor.. Of course if I had then 1 false alarm per second, this would be an issue anyway........... But I think there's something better in the market today..
Cheers,
Simone