Intel Gaps

Note to industry: Think you've got the solution to help U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism agencies connect the dots to predict terrorist attacks? Think again.

Officials with the Energy Department's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory say there are major gaps between the technologies intelligence agencies need and what the private sector can deliver. One of the biggest problems is corporate products can't handle the terabytes of data that would be generated by culling through hundreds of federal databases to analyze terrorist clues, says Ned Wogman, director of the lab's homeland security research. A terabyte equals about 1 trillion bytes of data, so the industry still has quite a ways to go, Wogman says.

He and his fellow engineers ought to know. The lab is a pioneer in the field of visual analytics, and has developed various programs that show graphically how information is connected. Among the lab's senior staff is Jim Thomas, regarded as the godfather of the field. Wogman says the Defense Department tried to recruit Thomas for its controversial data analysis project, Terrorism Information Awareness, which tries to predict attacks.

Asked whether the lab's researchers had seen any corporate products lately that knocked their socks off, a spokeswoman for the lab responded rhetorically, "Other than ours?"