By David K. Shipler
With
Congress locked in an ideological impasse, the U.S. government may look weak
and bumbling, but it has never been more powerful in collecting personal
information about Americans and foreigners—the guilty and the innocent alike.
So how was it that the Navy knew less about Navy Yard shooter Aaron Alexis than
the press was able to learn in a few hours? How come Alexis kept his Secret
clearance despite police reports that he twice fired a gun, claimed to be hearing
voices, and thought his brain was being manipulated by extra-low frequency
radiation?
How did the Boston Marathon
attackers escape detection, when one of them had been called to the FBI’s
attention? And the would-be Christmas Day “underwear” bomber after his father
warned the U.S. embassy in Nigeria? And—given the global reach of the National
Security Agency—the al-Shabab squad in Nairobi’s Westgate Mall? The answers are
specific to each case, but among them is this: A dozen years after the 9/11 attacks,
the government has still not learned the central lesson of that failure, which
is not about amassing information but, rather, how to connect the dots among
disparate points of data that have been filtered and focused. The lesson has
remained unlearned partly because the indiscriminate collection accumulates unprocessed
information so rapidly in such volume as to be practically useless.
