For some reason the Catholic Church doesn't like Catholics to get too friendly with their Creator and so they stick their priests in the way. Fixed it for you.
But seriously, it says that "his query" produced Atta's photo (and 80 others only some of which apparently had anything to do with 9/11). What exactly was this query? "9/11 hijackers"? "terrorists named Atta"? "Arabs who've been pulled over"? So Atta's driving citations means it was theoretically possible for someone to pull his name up. The question is, why would they have done this? What would have motivated someone to perform that query, and how exactly does data mining driving citations lead to the important conclusion that Atta was a terrorist? Well TFA suggests that if Atta's bench warrant information had been availible to the officer issuing the second citation, then Atta could have been arrested and his vehicle impounded. And then, "At the impound yard, a curious investigator might have seen certain drawings, diagrams, blueprints, and notes. He might have seen flight manuals and textbooks and gotten more curious."
So that would be the expected impetus for the query.
So you are saying that since there are accounts of justice, criminals in general are to be trusted?
Yeah, I think that is called something like "innocent, until PROVEN guilty"