{"id":748,"date":"2010-01-25T07:50:24","date_gmt":"2010-01-25T14:50:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.harvardnsj.com\/?p=748"},"modified":"2014-11-14T14:32:16","modified_gmt":"2014-11-14T19:32:16","slug":"connecting-the-dots-and-the-christmas-plot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/nsj\/2010\/01\/connecting-the-dots-and-the-christmas-plot\/","title":{"rendered":"Connecting the Dots and the Christmas Plot"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Paul Rosenzweig –
\n<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

“We slipped up.”\u00a0 That\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

He has a gift for understatement.<\/p>\n

But the real question isn\u2019t whether we \u201cslipped up\u201d\u2014everyone knows we did.\u00a0 It\u2019s rather how and why we did.\u00a0 The truth is that this was a failure of policy, not of law.\u00a0 We did it to ourselves.\u00a0 In the immediate aftermath of 9\/11 the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration (DARPA) began work on techniques of data analysis called \u201cknowledge discovery\u201d techniques.\u00a0 They gave the project an unfortunate name\u2014Total Information Awareness<\/a>\u2014and did a poor job of reassuring troubled civil libertarians that the program would not become a “Big Brother<\/a>” tool.\u00a0 The research was killed.\u00a0 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 \u201cdots\u201d of the\u00a0 Abdulmutallab plot.\u00a0 Here\u2019s why:<\/p>\n

The evidence is increasingly clear that the problem was not a failure of intelligence collection.\u00a0 If public news reports are to be believed, it now appears that there was a reasonable amount of information about or related to Abdulmutallab.\u00a0 According to the New York Times<\/a>, we knew about possible underwear bombs, we knew about an unnamed Nigerian who might strike America during Christmas, and we knew from his father that Abdulmutallab had become increasingly radicalized and had been in contact with Anwar al\u2010Alwaki, a Yemeni radical.\u00a0 We had a partial name for a terror plotter\u2014\u201cUmar Farouk.\u201d\u00a0 And we may even have known (though it is not yet certain) that the British had denied Abdulmutallab a visa, a boon that we, on the other hand, had granted him.<\/p>\n

But what to do with all that information?\u00a0 And why didn\u2019t the dots get connected in the way we would have wanted?\u00a0 Some, like my colleague Nathan Sales<\/a>, think that there still remain institutional barriers to sharing information and that means that agencies are still hoarding data.\u00a0 No doubt.<\/p>\n

But there is a deeper and more insidious problem\u2014one that institutionally we have yet to overcome.\u00a0 The problem is that there is simply too much information out there.\u00a0 And information without context is nothing but noise.\u00a0 Only context and analysis transform information into knowledge and only knowledge is actionable.<\/p>\n

Consider: The National Counter Terrorism Center (NCTC) is one of two institutions we rely on to conduct all\u2010source analysis of terror threats (the other is the CIA).\u00a0 The NCTC\u2019s computer systems have links to more than 30 separate government systems, with more than 80 distinct databases.\u00a0 According to the Director of National Intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair, each day the NCTC gets thousands of pieces of intelligence from around the world, reviews thousands of names, and puts 350 new names onto the watchlist\u2014the list that Adbulmutallab was not put on.<\/p>\n

This is a veritable flood of data.\u00a0 In hindsight, of course, it is very easy to see the pieces that connect together to form a picture of Abdulmutallab\u2019s plot.\u00a0 But those 10 or so bits of information were floating in an ocean of other data\u2014literally millions of different individual entries from thousands of different sources in a host of different databases.<\/p>\n

Hindsight is always 20\/20.\u00a0 What we need is foresight.\u00a0 And the problem is that we continue to fixate on a human solution to our lack of foresight.\u00a0 We continue to rely on the intuition of analysts to provide the insight we need.\u00a0 It is all well and good to say \u201cwith the NSA intercept about a Nigerian we should have started looking at all Nigerians\u201d or \u201cwe should have begun looking at everyone named Umar Farouk,\u201d but those leaps of insight and anticipation are not routine\u2014they require analysis and consideration.\u00a0 And that requires time\u2014time to ponder the necessity of making precisely that inquiry.<\/p>\n

But time is what our analysts don\u2019t have.\u00a0 At least not enough of it.\u00a0 Not with the flood of data we are seeing.\u00a0 They have to prioritize and move certain lines of inquiry to the top of the pile.\u00a0 Probably, as Admiral Blair has said, the warning from Abdulmutallab\u2019s father should have moved the \u201cYemen\/Nigeria\/Bomb\u201d issue to the top of everyone\u2019s pile.\u00a0 But as that question moves up to the top, other intelligence questions move down.\u00a0 The truth is that not all of the pieces of information rise above the noise level . . . and so long as we rely on human intuition to tell us what to pull out of the noise and what not to, we are going to make mistakes.<\/p>\n

What we lack is not human intuition.\u00a0 Rather we lack the tools to make human intuition effective and automated.\u00a0 The head of the NCTC told a rather shocked Senate committee the other day that, in effect, NCTC analysts don\u2019t have a \u201cGoogle\u2010like\u201d tool for database inquiries.\u00a0 They can\u2019t, for example, simply type in \u201cUmar Farouk\u201d and pull up all the pages with links to that name.<\/p>\n

But even that wouldn\u2019t be enough\u2014because there would likely still be far too many \u201cUmar Farouk\u201d pages for any analyst to review (especially if instead the name we had was, for example, \u201cOmar Abdul\u201d).\u00a0 What is necessary, as the Markle Foundation<\/a> has said persistently, is for us to authorize and invest in tools that allow for automated analytics\u2014things like tagged data (so that corrections to information are automatically transmitted for updates), identity resolution techniques (so that \u201cUmar\u201d and \u201cOmar\u201d are both considered), and persistent queries (so that a question that an analyst asked last month about Umar Farouk persists in the databases and is automatically linked to a father\u2019s warning about his son Umar when that comes in three weeks later).\u00a0 We need automated knowledge discovery systems\u2014ones that run continuously and repeatedly so that every day we check for new information about \u201cUmar Farouk\u201d and about all the other hundreds of thousands of intelligence leads.\u00a0 These are tasks that take time, and time is what computers have plenty of.<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t have those tools now.\u00a0 In part it\u2019s a question of investment and development.\u00a0 But at its core it is a question of policy and politics. Without the tools needed, we develop what Jeff Jonas<\/a> calls \u201centerprise amnesia.\u201d\u00a0 He\u2019s right, and it\u2019s our own fault.<\/p>\n

All decisions have consequences.\u00a0 Our decision to stop research on data analytic tools back in 2003 has led, in an almost straight line, to our analysts\u2019 difficulty in sifting the signal of a real terrorist, like Abdulmutallab, from the noise of thousands of bits of data.\u00a0 It\u2019s time to rethink our priorities and our policies.<\/p>\n

–Paul Rosenzweig is the Principal at Red Branch Consulting PLLC and the former Deputy Assistant\u00a0Secretary for Policy at the Department of Homeland Security.<\/em><\/p>\n

Ciick here to read as a PDF<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Homepage photo courtesy The Washington Post<\/em>\"\"<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Paul Rosenzweig – “We slipped up.”\u00a0 That\u2019s 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\u2019t whether we \u201cslipped up\u201d\u2014everyone knows we did.\u00a0 It\u2019s rather how and why we did.\u00a0 The truth is that this was a failure of policy, not of law.\u00a0 We did it to ourselves.\u00a0 In the immediate aftermath of 9\/11 the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration (DARPA) began work on techniques of data […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-features"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/peZtUX-c4","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/nsj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/nsj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/nsj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/nsj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/nsj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/nsj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/748\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/nsj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/nsj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/nsj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}