Data mining not a panacea for catching terrorists, experts warn.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew
• Position: SECURITYBEAT

* Data mining, loosely defined as a search to uncover novel patterns or relationships in large sources of electronically stored information, is being used by federal agencies as a counter-terrorism tool.

Meanwhile, "the technology and tools are developing more quickly than the law," said Sharon Bradford Franklin, senior counsel of the Constitution Project, a nonpartisan think tank. It recently released a report, "Principles for Government Data Mining: Preserving Civil Liberties in the Information Age."

The volume of electronically available data is expanding every year along with increased computing power that can be used to exploit it.

"We really don't know the full scope of the government data mining counter-terrorism programs," she said.

Paul Pillar, director of the security studies program at Georgetown University, said, "We have to have every tool available to us. Data mining is one important set of tools."

However, it's wrong to think that it can be used with any certainty to predict an act of terrorism. There was a lot of hand wringing after the foiled Christmas Day plot in 2009 when critics complained that the so-called underwear bomber should have been caught through link-analysis or "connecting the dots," said Pillar, who spent 28 years in the CIA. But a link that seems apparent in hindsight is just one data point. The best that can be expected is that data mining will "improve the odds for the good guys," he said.

There are always going to be tradeoffs when it comes to exploiting these databases and...