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Data Mining In Law Enforcement
jcatcw points out a blog entry by Scott McPherson, CIO for the Florida House of Representatives. McPherson condemns the state of data sharing and data mining in law enforcement, saying that the US causes itself a great deal of trouble by focusing more on "antiterror armor and nuke-sniffing devices" than a useful information distribution network. He discusses a few such projects, and how they could have directly affected the events of 9/11. Quoting:
"One of those ingenious things that actually worked, Seisint founder Hank Asher's brilliant MATRIX system, remains mired in controversy and politics. Hank showed me MATRIX just a few short weeks after the 9/11 attacks. Using law enforcement data and commercial data, all of the commercial data available in the public domain, Asher's query produced [hijacker Mohamed] Atta's photo -- and about 80 others, many of them fellow 9/11 hijackers, many of them associates of the 9/11 hijackers. It was simple data mining and algorithms, and none of the information was obtained illegally."
You already emit sound waves and light through your windows. So I presume you don't mind people watching you 24/7 with binoculars, bouncing laser light off your windows to eavesdrop on your conversations and tempest-style technologies to see what is on your computer monitor?
Just because the information is theoretically available doesn't mean that it is available to a corrupt officer who doesn't have cooperation of the whole government organization and outside scientists. Crooks are usually dumb and have no idea how to write human behavior modeling software.