1.2 Rivers of Scraps

"It's not going to be a cruise missile or a bomber that will be the determining factor," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said over and over in the days following September 11. "It's going to be a scrap of information." Make that multiple scraps, millions of them, flowing in a digital river of information at the speed of light from servers networked across the planet. Rumsfeld is right: the landscape of battle has changed forever and so have the weapons—if commercial airliners can become missiles. So also has how we use one of the most ethereal technologies of all human creativity and imagination: AI.

AI in the form of text-mining robots scanning and translating terabyte databases able to detect deception, 3-D link analysis networks correlating human associations and interpersonal interactions, biometric identification devices monitoring for suspected chemicals, powerful pattern recognition neural networks looking for the signature of fraud, silent intrusion detection systems monitoring keystrokes, autonomous intelligent agent software retrieving e-mails able to sense emotions, real-time machine-learning profiling systems sitting in chat rooms: all of these are bred from (and fostering) a new type of alien intelligence. These are the weapons and tools for criminal investigations of today and tomorrow, whether we like it or not.

Which of the 1.5 million people who cross U.S. borders each day is the courier for a smuggling operation? Which respected merchant on ebay.com is about to abandon successful auction bidders, skipping out with hundreds of thousands of dollars? What tiny shred of the world's $1.5 trillion in daily foreign exchange transactions is the payment from an al-Qaeda cell for a loose Russian nuke? How many failed passwords attempts to log into a network are a sign of an organized intrusion attack? Finding the needles in these types of moving haystacks and the answers to these kinds of questions is where data mining can be used to anticipate crimes and terrorist attacks.