[Infowarrior] - Information Feeds to the War on Terror

[Richard Forno]

Tell Us What's Going to Happen
Information Feeds to the War on Terror

Samuel Nunn

We want to know things before they occur. Anticipate, react, prevent. This
idea is embedded not only in counter-terrorism policy, but in the cultural
narratives produced by television and cinema. Television programs such as 24
or CSI, and movies such as The Conversation, The End of Violence, Minority
Report, and The Siege are self reflexive mirrors of the U.S. war on terror.
Through tricky technology systems like the Multi-State Anti-Terrorism
Information Exchange (MATRIX) and Terrorism Information Awareness (TIA) and
Regional Information Sharing Systems (RISS) and TIPOFF and AFIS and VICAP,
America seeks policies and programs -- read this as machines and software --
that will anticipate terrorist attacks in order to stop them before they can
occur.[1] The desired outcome is complete deterrence. If this outcome was
achieved, it would be the most mighty feat of prognostication and prevention
ever conceived.

The reason? Doing so would require the real time synthesis and analysis of
volumes of data equal to something like the number of stars in the universe.
Criminal justice technology systems produce voluminous information flows.
Billions of bytes of data are constantly on the move among police agencies
describing individuals, their criminal histories, assets, debt, locations at
particular times, purchase patterns, biometric identifiers (fingerprints,
photographs, DNA samples) and other aspects of the people or the activities
they are thought to have performed. At any given moment, thousands of
inquiries are sent through dozens of regional, national, and international
systems seeking answers to questions about people's identity, where they
are, what they have done, or what more other agencies and agents know about
these individuals. In 2005 the FBI's National Crime Information Center
(NCIC) averaged 4.5 million inquiries per day.

Within this storm of data, terrorism is the boogeyman of the 21st century.
And there is only one way to assuage our fears of sudden, brutal terrorist
attacks: convince us that we will always uncover the conspiracies before the
explosion, always know who the perpetrators are before they act, always stay
one step ahead of them, always arrest them before the carnage. It is a
process identified by Richard Grusin as premediation: a shift of focus to
controlling the future and stopping attacks before they occur or, more
simply, profiling the future.[2] It is the premediation of the future, an
advance word about what is going to happen. This model helps us accept 9/11
as an interruption or aberration. Looking back, we had the pieces if only
someone had put them together: the plot was within our grasp. Heroic FBI
agents wrote memos, villainous or incompetent supervisors ignored them or,
worse, destroyed them.[3] Mohammed Atta is on the surveillance tapes; why
didn't someone see him? Ziad Jarrah, pilot of UA flight 93 (destined for a
Pennsylvania farm field, and now the subject of an A&E made-for-cable movie,
Flight 93 and Hollywood's United 93), gets a speeding ticket in Maryland on
September 9th; why didn't someone stop him? Someone always knows. The truth
is out there. 

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