I know nothing. I swear. Really.

Seriously, the latest, from Fox News (hat tip to Chris Regan at Junk Yard Blog), has this intriguing bit about information from John D. Smith, one of the analysts who backs Capt. Phillpott’s claim that Able Danger identified Mohammed Atta in early 2000: “Smith said one way the unit came to know Atta was through Omar Abdul [sic] Rahman, [aka “the Blind Sheik,”] part of the first World Trade Center bomb plot in 1993. Smith said Able Danger used data mining techniques — publicly available information — to look at mosques and religious ties and it was, in part, through the investigation of Rahman that Atta’s name surfaced.”

This, of course, doesn’t mean Atta was identified in the course of WTC’93 investigation (1993-1995). Could he have been one of the zillion people whose names flashed across the radar screen? I suppose it’s conceivable, but I think we’d have heard that by now from the FBI or DoJ. The real point here is the wonder of data mining. All of the information presented from the terror trials of the 90s – persons, places, phone records, bank records, etc. – was open source material once it was presented in court. It was available to be dumped into computers and analyzed with programs so that terrorist patterns could be developed. If someone like Atta later fit such a pattern, you then had a line on a terrorist.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that a public trove of intel is a two-way street – as has been noted by those of us who have pointed out the perils of attacking terrorism by criminal trials. Because that information was made public, it was all out there for al Qaeda to mine too. They don’t have our capabilities and resources, but they aren’t terribly concerned about your civil rights, so they don’t have walls either.