Intelligence failure: get the right IT system thinking

[davidbfpo]

I've looked through the Intelligence thread and cannot immediately find an appropriate thread for this.

Bear with me, it could fit in the Detroit bombing thread: http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...ead.php?t=9331 and FBI investigations: http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...ead.php?t=8828 - both are useful cross references, hence the links.

Robert Haddick today has written 'Computers must take over counter-terrorism analysis', which at first I thought was another "IT can fix it"; pg. 2 of this article
:http://www.foreignpolicy.com/article...nment?page=0,1

Then I recalled Jeff Jonas is an IT expert (at IBM) and was well worth reading, having thought hard on the issues around data. His blogsite is: http://jeffjonas.typepad.com/ and just to illustrate try his post-9/11 ppt on the hijackers associations:http://jeffjonas.typepad.com/SRD-911-connections.pdf

After a long absence he has now commented on what he calls 'The Christmas Day Intelligence Failure', note this is Part One:http://jeffjonas.typepad.com/jeff_jo...elligence.html

He advocates that "data finds data":

The December 25th event is a classic case of enterprise amnesia. Enterprise Amnesia is the condition of knowing something on one hand and knowing something on another hand and never the two data points meet....

Abdulmutallab applies for a multi-entry visa. The terrorist database (TIDE) is checked and found to contain no such record. The State Department issues a visa. Later, a TIDE record for Abdulmutallab is added to TIDE. The split-second this record is added to TIDE, the State Department is notified the visa may need reconsidered.

Devil in the details. For all this to work, the system needs to realize that despite name variations and inconsistent data, the identity in the terrorist database is the identity in the visa system...

Jeff raises difficult issues for non-IT outsiders to think about - as we should be the ones setting the requirements for IT help - and I will add subsequent parts as they appear.

He is a very entertaining speaker on these issues.