| The 20 hijackers are known...and they only get a 25% hit rate ? Is that good ?
What they don't tell us is what happened when they looked into the other 95 people in the top 100. Have they uncovered any other plots with this, or just a bunch of recent arrivals with Arabic-sounding names who happened to live in Arab neighborhoods? My guess would be the latter. There is probably some merit in a Bayesian network type deal involving the bad guys' addresses and acquaintences, but I doubt that was in anything Seisint did (at least that early on -- they might be doing it now). The biggest problem with all these statistical methods for finding terrorists by data-mining U.S. public records and credit data is that the bad guys have very few footprints. It's a wonder they even found 5 of them in there... it was probably the credit cards that got them in. If you are a recent arrival to America, and you don't purchase any real proerty, and you don't get yourself arrested, and you stay away from consumer credit, you could stay off Seisint's (or ChoicePoint's, or any of those guys') radar for a long time... certainly long enough to plan and execute a Bad Thing. |
We can't tell from anything written here. Seisint's database is basically public records data plus credit bureau stuff. I would bet that the Amazing Terrorism Quotient was thrown together by Hank Asher himself in less than a day, probably just for the hell of it. It probably had no more "statistics" in it than some weighting scheme that started out as WAGs. The weights were then diddled with until all the hijackers in the data base floated to the top. Presto, a "product" for the feds.