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NPR, by Dina Temple-Raston

Morning Edition, July 14, 2009 � ...

McGrew works for Palantir Technologies, a Silicon Valley company that, among other things, sells software to the FBI and CIA. The software is meant to help the government find patterns among terrorists - by spotting clues in everything from phone calls to the kind of trail McGrew left on his way to work.

So, imagine for a moment that instead of being a software engineer, McGrew was a terrorist. In that case, his simple morning errands could be seen in a more sinister light. And he would have left a data trail in at least three places: at Starbucks, at his credit card company and at his bank. If he were a suspect, the government might well have scooped up that information as a way to track him down or see with whom he is associating.

Unpredictable Patterns

Intelligence officials have been hoping for some time that vacuuming up vast amounts of information and putting it into a computer would uncover some sort of discernable terrorist pattern. The technique, known as data mining, is controversial because information on the innocent, as well as potential terrorists, ends up in the same database. Now it is increasingly unclear whether data mining will ever really work because terrorists don't appear to have predictive patterns.

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