Information Overload Kills

Information overload kills

The following may appear strange to the dutiful readers of this blog and Digital Communities in general.

The political kerfuffle in Washington over a failed effort on Christmas Day to ignite an explosive device on a Northwest Airlines' passenger air plane approaching Detroit from Amsterdam demonstrates the limitations of security technology today.

This columnist has written about the millions of unverifiable names, which have sat rotting away inside giant US government terrorism watch list databases since 9/11.

Now, we have an example of a would-be airplane bomber who was undone not by any security infrastructure built in place -- but by his own incompetence in terms of handling a liquid explosive material and the quick wittedness of fellow airplane passengers who scrambled to stop the 23 year old Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab from doing any further damage.

One complaint is that there are insufficient numbers of skilled intelligence analysts within the US government with the ability to spot genuine terror threats among the volumes of electronically stored emails, telephone calls and other forms of private communications.

Another is that there are too many bureaucratic layers within US intelligence to allow for a coherent approach.

But the bigger issue is really human capacity to absorb only so much data and analyze it, even with all of the sophisticated software tools at hand.

"No matter how sophisticated or exotic, [the databases] are not likely to succeed in helping [to] find needles in haystacks that are constantly being fed more hay. Not this decade anyway," states Coleen Rowley, a former FBI special agent for 24 years and a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

In a recent interview she makes the important point that it is US foreign policy and military overkill -alluding to places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan Somalia, and Yemen -- that is radicalizing more local people and creating more terrorists in the process.

The US government data bases, writes Middle East expert and blogger Juan Cole, are at the heart of a failed US led campaign which has tended "to cast a broad net" to ward off terrorism.

"You catch terrorists with good police work. You look at networks, suspicious behavior, clues. Ignoring the desperate pleas of a father who goes to the CIA with information about his son being radicalized in Yemen but then patting down 170 million Nigerians ever after is brain dead."

Cole is referring to the Obama's administration's list of countries whose citizens will be subject to extraordinary scrutiny by American border officials.

But the combination of pat downs, long rounds of interrogation and the naked exposure of passengers with high tech whole body scanners will only "tax and tire" the airport inspectors and thus make them "less alert," he adds.

I guess what I am trying to say is that the hysteria around international security in the air is ignoring our own human limitations that cannot be easily solved through technology.

The latest manifestation is the new $150,000 a pop body scanners which are being installed with much haste in airports around the world. Based on the millimeter wave sensor technology they are designed to do what critics are calling "digital strip searches."

However the new scanners would not have caught the recently dubbed underwear bomber, technical experts have told the London Independent.

Abdulmutallab was allegedly concealing in his underpants on the Northwest flight a package containing nearly 3 ounces of the chemical powder PETN (pentaerythritol tetranitrate). Also, he carried a syringe containing a liquid accelerant for the purposes of detonating the explosive.

The Independent spoke to Ben Wallace, a Conservative MP, who was formerly involved in a project by a leading British defense research firm to develop the scanners for airport use. He told the newspaper that such trials indicated that low density chemicals, liquids and plastics can go undetected with these devices.

On the other hand, the new scanners will spot high- density material such as metal, knives; guns and dense plastic such as the C4 explosive.

Journalist James Ridgeway at Mother Jones magazine makes note of how the former Department of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, frequently popping up here and there promoting the new scanners, is actually now a paid lobbyist in Washington for one of the leading whole body imaging machine makers, Rapiscan Systems.

Because the new body scanners cannot detect what terrorists might put inside their bodies, the next generation of intrusive technology down the pipe for airports might come straight out of the UK prisons, Ridgeway reports.

He points to the Body Orifice Security Scanner or BOSS chair (how Monty Pythoneque!) which has been compared to an electric chair and is largely used to track cell phones, shivs, and other dangerous contraband that has been swallowed or inserted into body cavities by inmates. "So far, it only detects metal, but you never know," says Ridgeway.