Connecting the Dots

[N(N–1)]/2 where N = Number of People
- Formula used to calculate the number of communications channels in a group of people.

The terrorist attempt on the Northwest Airlines flight into Detroit over Christmas has a lot of people talking about “connecting the dots.” Less than a day after the bomb plot was foiled by the flight’s passengers, Peter Hoekstra (R-Mi), the ranking member on the House Intelligence committee said “People have got to start connecting the dots here and maybe this is the thing that will connect the dots for the Obama administration.”

Hoekstra was just one of many officials from both parties who strutted across the TV talk show landscape in the week between Christmas and New Years discussing the United States’ inability to “connect dots” to foil terror plots. President Obama seems to agree with this assessment. On Tuesday he is gathering his security chiefs together to analyze what went wrong and what can be done to fix it.

But how realistic is all this talk of “connecting the dots?”

Could a vague warning that “a Nigerian” was being trained in Yemen for an attack really lead to the identification of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as “the” Nigerian involved? His father did warn US Embassy that he was worried his son had fallen under the spell of radical Islam and had dropped out of sight, but he did not have an idea where his son was. The UK did deny the bomber a visa, but not for terrorist activities, as some have implied. They rejected his student visa because he listed the name of a school that did not exist on his application – a not uncommon problem.

In reality these clues were not standout red flags. They were not in FBI reports of people on student visa’s paying cash for flight schools and saying they did not need to learn how to land a plane. They were not in an intelligence briefing titled “Bin Laden determined to Strike US.”

They were dots in a sea of dots.

In a sea of dots, how do you know which dots are important and which dots are related? Too much information is overwhelming. There is so much data that we miss what is important. In addition, the more people involved in handling information, the more complex the network for communicating that information becomes.

The formula at the top if the page, [N(N–1)]/2 where N = the number of people, expresses that complexity.

There are 16 agencies in the US collecting information on terrorist or potential terrorists, their plots and their plans. Let’s say for example each agency has only ten analysts reviewing data and communicating their individual findings to each other. This formula shows that there will be 12,720 distinct channels of communications between those 160 analysts. That is a lot of potential interagency pathways for a “dot” to travel before it can be connected to another dot seen by a different analyst. Once they are connected, these two “dots” will now have to travel those same potential pathways again before any warning is heard.

Obviously the US has more than 160 analysts working on identifying terrorists and foiling their plots, so the enormity of the task of connecting these dots is clear. The solution then, is not building a system to get more dots to connect, it is building a system that focuses on the important dots. The Obama administration took a step in the right direction by rolling back the security requirements for international passengers from all but a specific set of countries. Hopefully this sort of refocusing is happening throughout the intelligence gathering community. If that is true, then maybe Obama will also have the courage to roll back some of President Bush’s more intrusive domestic spying initiatives.

In the mean time all of this talk about failure “to connect the dots” trivializes the challenge we face. This is not the child’s game of connecting dots in a predetermined order to create an obvious picture. It is more like dumping large box of colored dots on a big table and asking us to assemble them into the correct painting by Pissarro.

What is truly amazing is not the number of times we have failed, it the number of times we have gotten the painting right.