Guest Blogger: Connecting the Dots and the Christmas Plot

Paul Rosenzweig / January 27, 2010

“We slipped up.”  That’s what Patrick F. Kennedy the Undersecretary of State for Management said at a Senate hearing last week about the Christmas Day bomb plot and the arrest of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

He has a gift for understatement.

But the real question isn’t whether we “slipped up” – everyone knows we did.  It’s rather how and why we did?  The truth is that this was a failure of policy, not of law.  We did it to ourselves.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration (DARPA) began work on techniques of data analysis called “knowledge discovery” techniques.  They gave the project an unfortunate name — Total Information Awareness — and did a poor job of reassuring troubled civil libertarians that the program would not become a “Big Brother” tool.  The research was killed.  But the concept behind the research was visionary and those are precisely the tools that, if we had them today, would have made it more likely that we would have connected the “dots” of the Abdulmutallab plot.  Here’s why: (more…)