Ed's Blog

Data Mining, Terrorism, Systems Thinking, bureaucracy

A recent article in the August 17th, Chicago Tribune, (see http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0508170159aug17,1,4763588,print.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed&ctrack=1&cset=true) entitled - "Officer says Unit Tried to Warn FBI pre-9/11"
- describes how a special government data mining unit successfully identified Mohamed Atta and "as well as three of the other future hijackers by name by mid-2000, and had tried to arrange a meeting that summer with agents of the FBI's Washington field office to share its information.

But he said military lawyers forced members of the intelligence program to cancel three scheduled meetings with the FBI at the last minute.

Shaffer said he learned later that lawyers associated with the Defense Department's Special Operations Command had canceled the meetings because they feared controversy if Able Danger was portrayed as a military operation that had violated the privacy of civilians who were legally in the United States."

My comments:

From an academic and systems thinking perspective, an important lesson I take from this is the importance of organizational design and the perspective of systems theory when designing intelligence gathering organizations.

Specifically, "Able Danger," the data mining and intelligence gathering unit, successfully (presumably) gathered information about Atta and the other potential terrorists. However, they cannot take action on their own, their organizational mission is to gather the intelligence, using data mining and whatever means. The FBI is the organization, and set of organizational units (systems), that has as its mission to also act on the intelligence. However, problems are often encountered during "hand-offs" or when two or more organizational units (systems or sub-systems) must coordinate or pass information between or among sub-systems. Several questions arise: How is this information treated as it is passed between organizations? In other words, is the information treated as 100% accurate (not likely), does Able Danger assign probabilistic attributes to the data? If not, does the FBI do their own filtering of information that is passed in to their organization? What are the reward systems and performance feedback systems in the relevant FBI organizational units and in Able Danger? In other words, is it Able Danger's mission to simply identify and thus they are reprimanded if something, some information, is missed, or are there negative incentives, reprimands for supplying incorrect or wrong information?

Depending on the nature of the reward/incentive, feedback systems for Able Danger and for the FBI, information sharing and filtering can be problematic so that each sub-system can be doing their job, but, without looking at the design of the entire system - i.e., "draw one big circle around both the relevant FBI unit and Able Danger units," then both subsystems may be functioning correctly, according to their design, but the entire system, the big circle, may be functioning improperly. What is important is the outcomes assessments at the big circle - reward and incentive systems and feedback must be designed with the larger picture in mind.

What actually happened? We may never know all of it but, to repeat from above:

"Shaffer said in an interview that the highly classified intelligence program known as Able Danger had identified the terrorist ringleader, Mohamed Atta, as well as three of the other future hijackers by name by mid-2000, and had tried to arrange a meeting that summer with agents of the FBI's Washington field office to share its information.

But he said military lawyers forced members of the intelligence program to cancel three scheduled meetings with the FBI at the last minute.

Shaffer said he learned later that lawyers associated with the Defense Department's Special Operations Command had canceled the meetings because they feared controversy if Able Danger was portrayed as a military operation that had violated the privacy of civilians who were legally in the United States."

System Explanation: the military lawyers were acting according to their job descriptions, reward systems, etc, in other words, their primary concern was to keep the organizational unit out of legal trouble. In that sense, they did their job. Rather than say "the people were stupid," it is more accurate to realize the design of the systems was not properly thought out. When designing organizational and information gathering systems, one must have a clear picture of the overall goals, how the subsystems' subgoals contribute to the attainment of the overall goals, and how one can achieve clear, consistent, correct, and accurate transfer of information between and among the subsystems to achieve these overall goals. In essence, one must develop a good design.

posted by Unknown @ 7:42 AM