Jeff Sallot

How did American officials miss the warning signs and allow a would-be suicide bomber on to a plane to Detroit Christmas Day?

Hasn’t the U.S. government figured out Google technology yet?

Journalists and other information workers who deal with sophisticated technologies and massive data bases every day are scratching their heads at this failure of the U.S. intelligence community to connect the dots.

The bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was in their data bases.

He was fingered by his own father a full five weeks before the attempted bombing.

The father told U.S. intelligence officials in Nigeria that the young man, a student in possession of a U.S. entry visa, had come under the influence and control of violent elements of al Qaeda in Yeman.

There were other red flags that should have been seen by the Americans. Abdulmutallab bought a one-way ticket to the U.S. and paid cash, for example.

That was the M.O. of the 9/11 suicide hijackers.

A White House report released Jan. 9 found there was:

A failure of intelligence analysis, whereby the CT (counterterrorism) community failed before December 25 to identify, correlate, and fuse into a coherent story all of the discrete pieces of intelligence held by the U.S. Government related to an emerging terrorist plot against the U.S. Homeland organized by al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and to Mr. Abdulmutallab, the individual terrorist.

Specifically, intelligence analysts failed to search all of the data bases available to them when they tried to check out Abdulmutallab.

And then there was the typo. Somebody at the U.S. State Department entered a search for Abdulmutallab in that department’s data base of people with valid U.S. visas.

That somebody – the White House report doesn’t say so but it was probably some overworked and underpaid junior clerk -  entered the name incorrectly. And when the computer  search didn’t provide any match the State Department concluded there was no Abdulmutallab with a visa.

Valid visa

And so Abdulmutallab wasn’t put on the no-fly list. He boarded the plane to Detroit in Amsterdam using his own name and passport stamped with a valid visa.

Once upon a time, linking data bases was a big technical problem. But Google figured it out years ago.

Simple typos in data base searches can still be a problem. But Google technology can help here, too. Google will give you not just exact matches, but if you even get close you’ll be asked about the near misses as well.

Try it yourself. Type Abdulmutallab’s name in a Google search box and deliberately transpose two letters. You’ll be asked if you mean Abdulmutallab.

Yet this type of technology was all too much for the U.S. government.

The White House report says: “Information technology within the CT community did not sufficiently enable the correlation of data that would have enabled analysts to highlight the relevant threat information.”

You would think that nine years after the 9/11 attacks the U.S. government would have its own equivalent of Google technology for correlating all-source intelligence. Apparently not.

There were other human errors, the White House report says. National Counterterrorism Center and the Central Intelligence Agency who are responsible for the aviation watch list “did not search all available databases to uncover additional derogatory information that could have been correlated with Mr. Abdulmutallab,”

My undergraduate journalism students know how to do a Google search even before their first reporting class. They soon learn that as powerful as it is, Google isn’t enough.

They also have to check for background information in other, more sophisticated and reliable data bases, like Factiva. Our university library provides online access.

In other words, a journalism student who had access to the same data bases that are available to U.S. intelligence analysts would  have connected the dots and tagged Abdulmutallab as someone who shouldn’t be allowed on a plane to the U.S., or anywhere else  for that matter.

Part of the problem may be the structure of the U.S. intelligence community. There are too many centres. There is the National Counterterrorism Center, and the FBI is responsible for the Terrorist Screening Center. And of course they have the Central Intelligence Agency.

When you have more than one centre you don’t really have a centre. You have a network. Maybe. If you link the centres properly, using the Google-type technology that’s been around for years.

Reporters vs spies

From time to time government officials will compare the work of intelligence officers to a reporter’s job.

I’ve had this conversation with intelligence officers more than once.

They’ll begin by saying they are like a journalist trying to gather background information.

You start with open sources in data bases. You see where the gaps are.

You identify potential sources who might be able to fill in the gaps.

You try to get those sources to talk with you. And then you write a report or an analysis.

I hasten to remind intelligence officers that there is one very big difference in what they do and what a journalist does.

Journalists publish their reports for all the world to see. If we get it wrong we can be held to account by the people who read our reports and by those whom we write about.

If a reporter makes a really big mistake he may lose his job and his organization’s libel insurance company will have to fork out a financial settlement.

If intelligence and security agencies screw up people can die.

Even after the publication of the White House report the CIA still doesn’t seem to get it.

George Little, the CIA spokesman, told the New York Times the agency would try to do better to make sure information it receives will be shared across the government within 48 hours.

Two days? That’s more than enough time for terrorists to do untold harm. Any journalist who took 48 hours to report a hot news tip would be out of a job.

The White House report on the Abdulmutallab case was enlightening and important. Even in a security-sanitized version, its publication shows that the Obama administration is not afraid to share the truth with the public.

And the truth is, the U.S. government should be learning from Google.