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Connecting the Dots beyond Counterterrorism and Seeing Past Organizational Failure

On September 9, 2001, a Maryland state trooper stopped Ziad Jarrah for a traffic violation. Having no reason to do otherwise, the trooper sent Jarrah on his way. Two days later, he was the hijacker-pilot of Flight 93, which crashed in rural Pennsylvania. Citing incidents like this stop, the 9/11 Commission found that the intelligence community had failed to “connect the dots.”1 In response, the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) promised to link the entirety of domestic intelligence—from municipal police departments to the federal intelligence community—with a new National Network of Fusion Centers. At the same time, the spread of intelligence-led policing (ILP) complemented the rise of these networked intelligence hubs with a “smarter” approach that uses intelligence to preempt threats. The resultant process of intelligence fusion starts with information: massive databases decades in the making; open-source data gleaned from the web and social media; and streams of information created by new surveillance systems like automated license plate readers. To “fuse” data into useful information, analysts often use powerful computers and specialized software to “connect the dots” and, in theory, draw out the signal from the noise of data. Different tools offer different insights. With specialized software, analysts can turn unintelligible and interminably long lists of phone calls into a pattern of use, and, from there, a social network analysis. They can map unwieldy agglomerations of information—such as geospatial data drawn from police files, the census, and other public records—to create “predictive” heat maps to anticipate where the next shooting is likely to occur. Intelligence fusion also “connects the dots” in simpler ways. Often, fusion centers operate as data brokers, providing investigative support to law enforcement partners. Data brokerage can also mean doing even less: in so-called “pass-throughs,” fusion centers simply disseminate another agency’s intelligence reports. 1. Connecting the Dots beyond Counterterrorism and Seeing Past Organizational Failure