The Nigerian boy, who set his crotch on fire a couple of weeks ago, brought about much hand wringing, finger pointing, calls for body scanners, and President Obama taking responsibility for the nonething. Certainly there were shortcomings airline security but there was no sin of commision of ommission. It was a pointless to waste a political mea culpa. The political noise and advice from all corners terribly confuses the us with things about privacy rights, racial profiling and silly rules for airplane conduct. We've now failled to grasp how data is suppose to flow in our terrorism prevention information systems, and how to make the data "actionable."
It turns out that the presidential advisor for terrorism information assessment was as confused as anyone else. The problem wasn't even inter-agency at all, it was all within the State Department, from initial visa approval to Mutallab's dad making the report to the State Department in Nigeria, to the actual honoring of the visa for the fateful trip. This is the story of garbage in, garbage out. What happened was that the State Department didn't do it's homework. It didn't register the threat in its database and quite literally ignored all the other data that was readily available about a young Nigerian jetsetter, who just liked to hang-out in Yemen. The problem was that State Department employees came to believe that machines could make decisions for them and they could just enjoy the idea of being diplomats and enjoying their chardonnay
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