Third Source Says Able Danger ID'd Atta

Third time's a charm. Confirms there was a chart with Atta's name and picture on it.

And some interesting news about why Able Danger was ended -- because back in 2000, while she was still Provost at Stanford, their data-mining techinques pinpointed Condoleeza Rice as a potential spy for the Chinese government.

Okay-- sure, that's surely a miss, and that would make the Clinton Administration less likely to trust other AD findings. But data-mining has never promised a perfect accuracy rate -- it's a tool, and largely a mathematical one, and it always has to be checked against common sense and human understanding.

Still, the claim is that AD was disbanded because the Rice incident convinced officials at the time that what they were doing was close to "spying" on Americans. They weren't-- they were analyzing publicly-available information, and they should not have been disbanded.

posted by Ace at 12:11 PM

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