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In the intelligence world, this problem of information overload has life-or-death consequences. Unless analysts can filter out the essential pieces of information from the noise, they will miss the next Sept. 11 just as they missed the last one. The most disturbing fact that has emerged from the recent Sept. 11 postmortems is that government agencies had most of the relevant information in their hands before the tragedy. But they didn't understand it; they didn't see what was in front of their noses. They could not make the connections between an FBI memo in Arizona and a police report in Florida and a CIA watch notice about terrorists. They had the information but not the knowledge. Every war has its crucial technological puzzles. World War II was won with the help of two breakthroughs: Britain's development of code-breaking tools at Bletchley Park that allowed it to read German ciphers, and the Manhattan Project's advances in nuclear physics, which created the weapons that brought Japan's surrender. Is the CIA developing new tools that will help it see terrorist conspiracies before it's too late? I posed that question to three of the CIA's top information technology experts. The CIA officials speak of a "volume problem" that overwhelms analysts. Under normal procedures, the counterterrorism analyst prepares a query about a particular name and searches relevant databases - from intelligence reports to telephone intercepts to intercepted e-mails. The analyst gets back hundreds of "hits" and then launches a more detailed query, and another, and another. Maybe the analyst gets lucky and sees the incoming missile amid the chaff, but maybe not. The analysts have been stymied by some simple problems. The flowing script of Arabic documents and e-mails could not be processed in the same way as Western languages. Names mispronounced or misspelled often led to false trails. Work done by one analyst was not available to others. Crucial information was often in unstructured text files that could not easily be searched or categorized. Databases were not updated automatically. The CIA is building the tools to help solve these problems. The effort really began in 1999 when the agency created its own venture capital fund, called In-Q-Tel. From the start, its biggest mission was to develop new technologies to search and process information. In-Q-Tel has invested in some companies that only a nerd would love. Stratify Inc. in Mountain View, California, has developed a tool for automatically analyzing unstructured text and classifying it into folders, so that analysts can study it more easily. Attensity Corp. in Salt Lake City has created what amounts to a high-tech sentence diagrammer, which can examine a document and figure out whether a reference to "Wood," for example, means a person or a place. Inxight Software Inc. has created a "Star Tree" system for visualizing data so that one can see relationships between people, places and events. Tacit Knowledge Systems Inc. in Palo Alto, California, has built software that analyzes the flow of e-mails and other work coming from employees to see what they are interested in, and then make links to other analysts in disparate locations who may be working on related problems. That may sound like Big Brother, but it could have prevented Sept. 11. A Las Vegas company called Systems Research and Development Inc. has built a tool called "Non-Obvious Relationship Awareness," or NORA. It was initially developed for gambling casinos that wanted to detect unwanted visitors or crooked employees. The system's creators say it uses "fuzzy logic algorithms to make associations that are normally difficult for humans to detect" - things like false names, or hidden links between people. And for a glimpse of the future of the war on terrorism, consider Graviton Inc., a La Jolla, California, firm that specializes in making tiny sensors connected by wireless networks. The company proposes to create vast networks that could "sense a wide range of chemical, radioactive, explosive and toxic materials" and "remotely monitor environments from office buildings to public transportation to city blocks." Technology may not save us in the war against terrorism, but it's good to know that public money is being spent on new tools that may create knowledge rather than simply more information. International Herald Tribune The Washington Post Copyright © 2002 The International Herald Tribune |