Able Danger: Theory v. Reality

Here’s what Able Danger said they were doing:

Early Warning by William M. Arkin - washingtonpost.com: “Starting in 1996, LIWA deployed teams to Bosnia. They were part of a new vanguard of information warriors. They required detailed information on factions and individuals: decision-maker identities, biases and inter-relationships, identification of critical communications and information links and nodes, demographic data, populace biases and pre-dispositions. The goal was to harness this information to determine potential pressure points to leverage decision-maker/populace behaviors…

Back at Ft. Belvoir, VA, the LIWA Advanced Concepts and Analysis division, and later the Army’s Information Dominance Center (IDC) was employing new means for achieving “information dominance.” With the explosion of electronic information and the ability to move vast quantities of data quickly, analysts were increasingly facing the same problem confronting forensic accountants, insurance fraud investigators, and bank examiners: Large amounts of data was increasingly available, but it needed to be put in relational form in order to develop patterns, and then sense needed to be made of the patterns to reveal what had already happened or was about to happen.”

Here’s what they were actually doing. An illustration from the same article by William Arkin.

Translation: they were bombing the “Bosniacs” (!?) to death with press releases.

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