[Infowarrior] - Effective Counterterrorism and the Limited Role of Predictive Data Mining

[Richard Forno]

(found through www.pogowasright.org)

December 11, 2006
Policy Analysis no. 584
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6784

Effective Counterterrorism and the Limited Role of Predictive Data Mining

by Jeff Jonas and Jim Harper

Jeff Jonas is distinguished engineer and chief scientist with IBM's Entity
Analytic Solutions Group. Jim Harper is director of information policy
studies at the Cato Institute and author of Identity Crisis: How
Identification Is Overused and Misunderstood.

The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, spurred extraordinary efforts
intended to protect America from the newly highlighted scourge of
international terrorism. Among the efforts was the consideration and
possible use of "data mining" as a way to discover planning and preparation
for terrorism. Data mining is the process of searching data for previously
unknown patterns and using those patterns to predict future outcomes.

Information about key members of the 9/11 plot was available to the U.S.
government prior to the attacks, and the 9/11 terrorists were closely
connected to one another in a multitude of ways. The National Commission on
Terrorist Attacks upon the United States concluded that, by pursuing the
leads available to it at the time, the government might have derailed the
plan.

Though data mining has many valuable uses, it is not well suited to the
terrorist discovery problem. It would be unfortunate if data mining for
terrorism discovery had currency within national security, law enforcement,
and technology circles because pursuing this use of data mining would waste
taxpayer dollars, needlessly infringe on privacy and civil liberties, and
misdirect the valuable time and energy of the men and women in the national
security community.

What the 9/11 story most clearly calls for is a sharper focus on the part of
our national security agencies‹their focus had undoubtedly sharpened by the
end of the day on September 11, 2001‹along with the ability to efficiently
locate, access, and aggregate information about specific suspects

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6784