Briefs

City Journal -- Heather Mac Donald -- Spring 2004

... "No one in the research and development community is putting together tools to make us safer," says Lee Zeichner of Zeichner Risk Analytics, a risk consultancy firm, "because they're afraid" of getting caught up in a privacy scandal. The chilling effect has been even stronger in government. "Many perfectly legal things that could be done with data aren't being done, because people don't want to lose their jobs," says a computer security entrepreneur who, like many interviewed for this article, was too fearful of the advocates to let his name appear.

...

TIA would have been the most advanced application yet of a young technology called "data mining," which attempts to make sense of the explosion of data in government, scientific, and commercial databases

... on 9/11, the airline-passenger profiling system flagged as suspicious nine of the 19 hijackers as they attempted to board, including all five terrorists holding seats on American Airlines 77 ... Security procedures at the time prohibited airport personnel from interviewing flagged passengers or hand-searching their carry-on luggage

Here is the rest of the story.