Only the government is buying it

(Note: Before I begin, I would like to say that with articles like this, Culture11 is off to a great start.)

"The whole data-mining model doesn't work," he says. "We're sub-contracting to companies who want to solve terrorism with technology. It's pure snake oil." Explaining this, German likes to point out that pro football teams use much narrower data sets to scout rookies than the government does hunting terrorists, but they still draft a guy like Ryan Leaf. "If this kind of predictive analysis really worked, these companies would be selling their services in Vegas or on Wall Street. Vegas and Wall Street aren't buying it-only the government is."

It doesn't take a genius to realize that if the technology were viable, that investment firms would have been using it at least as long as the government has been trying to use it because of the way that it would revolutionize their profit making abilities. If nothing else, the technology would have been able to prevent the housing investment bubble that is currently rocking the national economy and threatening to drive many banks into bankruptcy.

For the government, this technology is just an end run around the fact that they need to do more human police work and intelligence gathering. Criminals and terrorists are not stop by computers, they're stopped by agents in the field. No small part of the reason why 9-11 happened was that for years, the government has sought unviable technical solutions to the basic problem that it just hasn't been doing nearly enough field work.