Connecting the Dots
"Umar the underwear Bomber" is every intelligence community's nightmare: a terrorist plot in its final stages, yet never identified. In hindsight, agencies found many disturbing pieces of information that could have led to stopping the attack, but the relationships among those pieces of information weren't evident.
This failure to connect the dots wasn't about bad decisions or policies. In fact, the Intelligence Community benefits from the most ambitious and wide-ranging information sharing policy in the Federal government. The failure to connect such disparate pieces of information lies in the systems and processes that handle information, which is where analytics like CAAT can play a crucial part.
Social networks, random web posts, known hostile entities, local suspect information all need to be correlated together using technologies that can also apply knowledge gathered from other sources to connect the dots.
Our partners have integrated CAAT with tools like SNA (social network analysis) and entity extraction to identify, to the 5th order, hidden relationships and connections across networks of individuals, and between known and unknown entities.
