Able Danger Story Heating UpHere's a
good backgrounder:
The unit that fingered Atta and connected him to a suspected Al Qaeda terror cell in Brooklyn was code-named, "Able Danger," according to the congressman and officials at the Pentagon. "Able Danger" involved staff from the Army's Information Dominance Center who operated under instruction from the Special Operations Command.
At some point in mid-2000, while the unit was running data-mining experiments, the computer produced Mohammed Atta's name along with a suggestion he was linked to other suspected Al Qaeda operatives. "Those connections led back to a Brooklyn cell, and that Brooklyn cell contained four of the terrorists," Mr. Weldon said yesterday.Many on our side are tying this to Bill Clinton and Jamie Gorelick, the Justice Department lawyer who wrote a memo creating a wall between intelligence operations and the FBI. However, this seems short-sighted. Clinton's retired and Gorelick is not going anywhere. The more interesting point is here:
While the "Able Danger" project was little discussed until recently, a broader Pentagon data-mining effort, known originally by the Orwellian name, "Total Information Awareness," was shuttered in 2003 after an outcry from privacy advocates. Some who were critics of that program say the recent developments suggest that the data-intensive technologies now deserve a second look.Unfortunately, it won't be able to be used in a purely partisan fashion, as the
Senate voted unanimously against TIA. (Brainster's Rule #1: When Republicans and Democrats vote unanimously in favor of something, they're usually wrong.) But that's not to say that their public statements about TIA can't be used against them by their opponents. I'd suspect that there are a bunch of "Big Brother" comments out there against the program by prominent Democrats.
