One of the fundamental lessons that America thinks it has learned from the September 11 attacks is the need to “connect the dots.” Lee Hamilton, one of the co-chairs of the 9/11 Commission that reviewed the events told Congress that “Poor information sharing was the single greatest failure of our government in the lead-up to the 9/11 attacks.”
But what do they mean when they say we didn’t “connect the dots?” After all, that’s just a phrase. What the Commission was referring to was two systematic and interrelated problems. One was a legal issue – a barrier to sharing information between the intelligence community and the law enforcement agencies. The other, however, was a failure to realize the potential for identifying correlations of data that could be used to uncover terrorist activity – a failure to connect previously unconnected information to build a better picture of activity.
In the aftermath of 9/11 one expert did this analysis to show how connecting the dots through link analysis might have uncovered the hijackers. As you can see, with just “7 clicks” of the mouse, if the right data sources had been correlated, it would have been possible to identify all of the hijackers. Would this have stopped 9/11? It’s impossible to say. But it certainly is the case that the lack of this information made preventing 9/11 impossible. In the context of The Data Minefield, this example haunts the memory of America’s security agencies.
