or won't face any reprisal, just or not, are two different things. That they are seen as legitimate by the government might be hard to convince people who were protesting due to a lack of trust in the government. I think you are right that they don't have a concern, but I can see how they'd think that way.

I don't think the evaluation is different other than their answers to where have you been and what have you done are different and therefore different actions are taken. I think they essentially try to establish your itinerary, then they go and find the people you likely exposed who they then recommend testing probably after some follow up.

I don't know their policies for determining which of your movements and visiting is worth trying to find who you were around, but I have to figure that it's a basic risk analysis of each activity you've done. How likely were you to transmit (risk), how likely are we able to find who you were around (cost)? Then you have to consider what your willingness for false positives and false negatives are. If you just identify everyone you are going to have false positives and you waste money testing them or whatever it is that you've chosen to do with contacts. If you have false negatives, you obviously don't prevent spread.

Let's say someone has gone for walks, gone to a baseball game, ate at a restaurant, and gone to a protest.

Walking down the street: The risk is low and the odds we find who you were around were low. A tracer probably isn't going to do anything with that.

Eating at a restaurant: the transmission odds are fairly significant and finding the other diners is easy.

Baseball game: transmission odds are high to people sitting near you, but low for people not sitting near you. Perhaps they can find who bought the seats within X feet of you fairly easily. That might be worth it. The people not near you might have passed you in the stadium but have a low risk, not worth sending them for testing or whatever.

A protest falls somewhere between walking down the street and a baseball game. There's no way to really stratify the risk level of other attendees. There's no business with records of who attended. People may not stay around the same people long. That sets you up for a lot of false positives.

I can see a protest just not really being worth the resources to do tracing on an individual level. It may just be a better value to make a blanket statement that people who were there should be vigilant but that spending $X to get tested, etc. isn't worth it at this point.

I just rambled. Hopefully I made some sense.