I think it is interesting...

That the people who want bush and his friends to admit that the government failed the American public also want to hinder that same government from achieving it's goals of protection.

Let me give an example:

The act and what it can do.

You can find many articles that talk about the patriot act, the TIA (total information awareness) project, and the martix ( Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange ).

The martix is the most interesting of them all, because the same company that was contracted for the martix did a demonstration after 9-11.

TIA

According to Seisint's presentation, dated January 2003 and marked confidential, the 120,000 names with the highest scores were given to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, FBI, Secret Service, and Florida state police. (Later, those agencies would help craft the software that queries Matrix.)


Of the people with the 80 highest scores, five were among the Sept. 11 hijackers, Seisint's presentation said. Forty-five were identified as being or possibly being under existing investigations, while 30 others "were unknown to FBI."


Out of the 80 to people with the highest HTF (high terrorist factor) 11 of them were directly involved in 9-11. Those results are absolutely amazing (and I bet with a little tweaking, the data could be improved), and if the information was received and acted on prior to 9-11, it would have never happened.

Let me restate that. If the federal government had mined the data it already had, for terror suspects prior to 9-11, and watched the followed around the most likely people for a few months, 9-11 would have never happened.

Of course the company who did the demonstration could have fudged the data. If they did not fudge the data, we had the ability to generate life saving information from other unused information, but because a combination of reasons we did not do it.


You can't have total protection with out an invasion of privacy. Our goal should be to place common sense restrictions on who gets the data, not stopping the government from getting the data it needs to protect us.

cube