December 07, 2005 | Able Data Mining?

Able Danger. TIA. Al Qaeda. Curt Weldon. John Poindexter. Slobodan Milosevic. Data mining. Information Dominance. Raytheon. Condoleezza Rice.

Shane Harris's feature at National Journal has them all.

In the spring of 2000, a year and a half before the 9/11 attacks, Erik Kleinsmith made a decision that history may judge as a colossal mistake.

Then a 35-year-old Army major assigned to a little-known intelligence organization at Fort Belvoir in Virginia, Kleinsmith had compiled an enormous cache of information -- most of it electronically stored -- about the Al Qaeda terrorist network. It described the group's presence in countries around the world, including the United States.

It was of great interest to military planners eager to strike the terrorists' weak spots. And it may have contained the names of some of the 9/11 hijackers, including the ringleader, Mohamed Atta.

The intelligence data totaled 2.5 terabytes, equal to about 12 percent of all printed pages held by the Library of Congress. Neither the FBI nor the CIA had ever seen the information. And that spring, Kleinsmith destroyed every bit of it.

[...]

But Able Danger, for all its intrigue, is just one piece of the unusual intelligence practices that Kleinsmith was engaged in, years before 9/11. In the late 1990s, Kleinsmith was the chief of intelligence for the Army's Land Information Warfare Activity, a support unit assigned to the Intelligence and Security Command. LIWA had broad authority to assist the Army and all military commands in conducting "information operations," a broad discipline that includes information warfare, public deception in combat, and intelligence analysis.

The Army's hub in this effort was the aptly named Information Dominance Center, based at Fort Belvoir. Since the late 1990s, the IDC has been home to some of the most innovative, unconventional, and controversial minds in the intelligence business. In its futuristic-style building -- its interior spaces designed by a Hollywood set artist to mimic the bridge of the starship Enterprise, complete with a large captain's chair in the center of the main room -- the IDC covered a range of topics.

Analysts tracked computer hackers who were targeting military networks, watched for potential avenues of Chinese government espionage, and charted the working relationships among foreign terrorists. To do this, the IDC relied heavily on a novel technique called "data mining."

On a recent afternoon at a coffee shop in Springfield, Va., not far from the IDC, Kleinsmith explained how data mining works. Putting pen to paper, Kleinsmith sketched clumps of circles, then surrounded some with concentric, wavy perimeters, until he'd drawn a crude version of a topographical map.

While the piece doesn't come to any firm conclusions on the quality of Able Danger's work or whether the program actually found Mohammed Atta, it's more than worth a few minutes of your time.

Full story here.

Posted by Ryan Singel at December 7, 2005 03:27 PM