Actionable Information; Intelligent and Automated information Management; and Crime Investigation

Before turning to analyze the 9/11 Report, let us go back to the Sniper incidents in the Washington DC area that happened in October-November of 2002. These incidents provided an interesting narrative for studying the importance and relevance of intelligent and automated information management technologies that can capture and analyze not just information but actionable information.

Sniper incidents also provided a very good example for defining the scope and meaning of actionable information (for more, see this earlier K-Praxis article - Actionable Information did it??):Actionable information is information that can be acted upon, something that leads to action, something that makes things happen, starts a chain of action and reaction and most of the time that information is a small piece of "smoking gun" hidden in a huge volumes of data. So
actionable information is that smoking gun which can become a pivotal point of a crime investigation.

And finally, the sniper incidents provided a real-life scenario for the application of intelligent and automated information management technologies, specially technology with a particular focus on textual analysis, and linguistics-based text mining and machine learning technologies. K-Praxis at that time concluded (for more, see this earlier K-Praxis article Information Management and Crime Investigation ): So it appears that the criminal justice system in the US needs to find a technology which would help them find relevant and actionable patterns in the vast amount of information that will not be in the database. Technology which could take information from the varied sources like phone calls, email messages and connect this information with information available in their own databases.

K-Praxis has elsewhere on this site argued (Political Risk Analysis and Unstructured Information Management) that intelligent and automated information management technology can serve as a de-politicizing factor in some of the very sensitive subjects like predicting the future of a leader or predicting the future of a country in crisis. But of course, such a technology will be so neutral that politicians and the agencies will stand no chance of hiding the unwanted truth .

It is important to note that although chronologically 9/11 happened much before the sniper incidents and and scale two events is incomparable, the parallels in terms of use of technology and coordination between agencies for information sharing are pretty remarkable. They make an interesting reading in order to understand the 9/11 report from an actionable information management perspective.

9/11 Report and Managing and Sharing Actionable Information

Now let us try to analyze the report separating it in two different segments: analyze the key findings first and then study the recommendations. Through this analysis we shall try to garner an understanding of the role of actionable information management and information sharing in the events prior to 9/11 disaster leading to the apparent failure of the agencies to predict this event.

• Key Findings which are classified under Factual Findings, Systemic Findings and Related Findings could be interpreted as saying that there was a huge amount of information that was amassed form various intelligence sources prior to 9/11 but that information was not analyzed to find actionable patterns, and important linkages and connections were missing, or even if connection were made those connections were not followed upon, the connections were not shared across the whole intelligence community. The volumes of intelligence information could not have indicated or was not analyzed to the extent that it could lead to identification of time, place, and specific nature of the attacks that were planned for September 11, 2001. The findings also indicate that despite the fact the advances in technology being one of the greatest advantages of United States, technology was not fully utilized to fight terrorism. The report also states that technological weaknesses in centralized information gathering and dissemination was partly responsible for the 9/11 disaster.
• The focus of recommendations provided in report again is on utilizing existing and future technologies to leverage the information amassed from various intelligence sources and to develop and use technologies such as "data mining" and other "cutting edge analytical tools" along with better streamlined information sharing within the intelligence community and to other relevant bodies. The report also argues for adoption of a better automatic translation technology to understand and interpret foreign languages.




• Reports also refers to geo-political issues and argues for more human insights pointing out failure of human analysts in understanding the threats of terrorism.

Conclusion

Like the sniper incidents, the ability to discover, leverage and share actionable information could prove to be very crucial for criminal
justice systems across the globe and best way forward seems to be developing user-oriented human-intervention and insights driven technologies to aid this process.

It is essential to point out that the intelligence community has moved on with adoption of cutting edge technologies, technologies that do more than "data mining" as referred in the report - the agencies have recently bought into language based text mining and information visualization technologies that would aid the agencies in creating a more stronger interpretive counter-terrorism analytical knowledge base than they have possessed till now.

But the success of these efforts will depend not just on the "coolness" or cutting edge nature of these technologies but who implements them, the information management experts who deploy and use these technologies, on people who will be able to squeeze out the full potential of these technologies and more importantly, the information managers who will be able to link the analytics derived from use of such technologies to human expertise base.

While arguing for use of intelligent and automated information management technologies it important remember that vendor claims about "understanding" capabilities need to be taken with a huge dollop of salt. To make the point any "intelligent" system will more or less fail to understand that one is playing with the idiom pinch of salt by supplanting pinch with dollop even it had a HUGE database of idioms.

But at the same human-supervised approaches where the software vendors solve a small niche information management problem, and do not claim major "understanding" type of capabilities have proved to be very useful.