Able (And Willing) To Intrude On Your Privacy

It seems quite possible that the Able Danger project could have picked up Mohammed Atta and other terrorists simply because it had such a mind-numbingly huge database, containing just about every scrap of information related to anybody who ever live, anywhere.

LIWA's al Qaeda project collected 2.5 terabytes of "open source" information, Shaffer says, a ridiculously immense amount of data equivalent to 500 million pages of text or a pile of paper 30,000 miles high if it were all printed out -- court records, news databases, credit card and telephone records. "Anything we could get our hands on," says Shaffer.

Little wonder only 3 of some 80 employees can recall Mohammed Atta's name turning up!

As the WaPo article says, the real scandal here is not that they missed Atta and failed to stop 9/11, but that such an illegal project even existed within the US government heirarchy.