Thousands of False Positives?

The NYT's Philip Shenon, who has done some of the Able Danger reporting, was interviewed Friday on WNYC. There host Mike Pesca raised the false positives question. Here's what Shenon said [listen at 18:40 mark]:

“I understand from others at the Pentagon  that one of the problems here is that  Able Danger came up with names not just of Atta and three others,  it came up with a tremendous number of  names of very decent American citizens.”

That sounds like a whole lot more than the "60"  the Times suggested...Friday (i.e. same day as the radio interview).  Are  Shenon and Jehl on the same page?

Comments

[277fia]

"Others at the Pentagon" told Shenon that Atta and the three other hijackers name did come up along with names of decent American citizens. But,according to Time, "Pentagon officials" say they can find nothing produced by the Able Danger program, which involved fewer than half a dozen intelligence analysts, mentioning Atta’s name. So which is it?

From the Time article, it appears that the Pentagon is not going to to deny officially that the Atta i.d. was made.

According to the former defense intelligence official in the 8/9/05 NY Times story, the chart had been based on information from unclassified sources and government records, including those of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Does the INS keep records on American citizens? What were the other government records used by Able Danger? Obviously, there was more sharing of information between government agencies in 2000 than we have been led to believe.

Depending on the source of records, the Pentagon may have been spying on US citizens (I have a problem there!)which would explain why Pentagon lawyers ruled out sharing the info with the FBI.
I can't imagine that the Pentagon would be too anxious to disclose it now, either.

Maybe the 60 suspected Al Qaeda members were extracted from a cast of thousands. What distinguished them? Obviously, the factor that singled them out wasn't "German visa holders with an Arab name that had recently traveled to Pakistan." So what was it?

I'm pretty damned curious about this story. What other records besides the INS ones, would have included the four hijackers? Did the Able Danger team have access to foreign government records? Did the Able Danger team press their case after the USS Cole attacks? If they used an outside contractor, did the contractor do any follow up?

[277fia]

"Others at the Pentagon" told Shenon that Atta and the three other hijackers name did come up along with names of decent American citizens. But,according to Time, "Pentagon officials" say they can find "nothing produced by the Able Danger program, which involved fewer than half a dozen intelligence analysts, mentioning Atta’s name". So which is it?

From the Time article, it appears that the Pentagon is not going to to deny officially that the Atta i.d. was made.

According to the former defense intelligence official in the 8/9/05 NY Times story, the chart was based on information from unclassified sources and government records, including those of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Does the INS keep records on American citizens? What were the other government records used by Able Danger? Obviously, there was more sharing of information between government agencies in 2000 than we have been led to believe.

Depending on the source of records, the Pentagon may have been spying on US citizens (I have a problem there!)which would explain why Pentagon lawyers ruled out sharing the info with the FBI.
I can't imagine that the Pentagon would be too anxious to disclose that fact to the public now, either.

Maybe the 60 suspected Al Qaeda members were extracted from a cast of thousands. What distinguished them? Obviously, if any of them were Americans, the factor that singled them out wasn't "German visa holders with an Arab name that had recently traveled to Pakistan." So what was it?

I'm pretty damned curious about this story. What other records besides the INS ones, would have included the four hijackers? Did the Able Danger team have access to foreign government records? Did the Able Danger team press their case after the USS Cole attacks? If they used an outside contractor, did the contractor do any follow up?

[lawnorder]

Thank you, thank you, thank you! I was wondering why no one had raised this up yet!!!

I have worked with data mining before, to forecast product sales. It is a wonderful tool but it gives A LOT of false positives.

A tale of success we often told management to sell data mining (and get our budget for it increased) is how it tied diaper purchases with beer purchases. It correctly discovered the new demographic of diaper buyers: Young dads who had to run to the store for diapers and took the opportunity to buy a 6-pack (it's the reason some stores place them in isles close to each other).

But data mining also picked up a lot of false correlations. Each correlation had to be triple checked by a person to make it usable. I'm sure the Atta / Brooklyn was only one in hundreds of equally probable correlations the data mining at Able Danger picked up.

I doubt it was this magic silver bullet they are trying to sell now. IMHO the research group itself discarded the Atta correlation as a false positive, then did a Homer Simpson's DUH on 9/12 and concocted the "green card" story