[IGOTMINE]

There are computer programs that greatly assist in the process, too.

I can't believe that a national agency hadn't already produced such a product. I would not be surprised if they never thought of disseminating it down to someone who could actually use it.

[Ispy4u]

There are national agencies working on the same thing. But these two have direct access to the arrest/interrogation process and utilized it exceptionally well.

Their original data came from a national database that hundereds of analysts have been working on for years.

But none of those analysts have ever looked a single person on that list in the eye. That is the difference.

[GunnyB]

You are exactly right. I attended demos of programs designed to do just this. One national agency I worked at for several years had an automated program that used programmable "filters" to construct possible nexuses (nexi ?) from various forms of communications. The results were displayed in "clusters" with weighted connections between the nodes. Supposedly, all one had to do was to feed this beast enough data and bingo - there's the person or people to target.

Your comment about disseminating tools like this down to the folks who could really use them is a critical issue within our intelligence services. Compartmentalization due to security requirements, while necessary for counterintelligence reasons, is really bad for spreading the wealth, so to speak.