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Just a few years ago, such goals would have been laughable. But innovations in artificial intelligence let the government recognize and quantify links between disparate forms of data. New software languages automatically translate information from different systems into a common tongue. Both advances have vastly expanded the tools available for the war against terrorism.
Throughout the '90s, data mining spread from one industry to the next, enabling companies to know more about customers' needs and to zero in on the characteristics that distinguish the customers they want from those they do not. A credit-card company using a system designed by Teradata, a division of NCR, found that customers who fill out applications in pencil rather than pen are more likely to default. A major hotel chain discovered that guests who opted for X-rated flicks spent more money and were less likely to make demands on the hotel staff, according to privacy consultant Larry Ponemon. These low-maintenance customers were rewarded with special frequent-traveler promotions. Victoria's Secret stopped uniformly stocking its stores once MicroStrategy showed that the chain sold 20 times as many size-32 bras in New York City as in other cities and that in Miami ivory was 10 times as popular as black. Aspect Communications, based in San Jose, Calif., sells a program that identifies callers by purchase history. The bigger the spender, the quicker the call gets picked up. So if you think your call is being answered in the order in which it was received, think again.
The technology that underlies these applications, known as customer-relationship management (CRM), is a subset of data mining and can be used by any organization that needs to quickly analyze massive amounts of data. "More and more often," says Michael Schiff, vice president of Current Analysis, a business-intelligence firm based in Sterling, Va., "you see it becoming 'X'RM, where the relationship being managed could be with a customer or supplier or stockholder or, to go out on a limb here, terrorist."
The potential has not been lost on the intelligence community. When CIA agents came calling on digiMine, a retail data-mining specialist based in Bellevue, Wash., they carried a list of 900 companies that were pursuing data-mining capabilities, says CEO Usama Fayyad. Through a nonprofit venture-capital fund that it finances, called In-Q-Tel, the CIA has invested in several data-mining companies that serve both the private sector and the CIA.