Classifying Terrorism
From: Terror Watchlist is “Imploding,” Legislator Says
According to a letter from the chair of the House Science and Technology Committee, the Terrorist Identites Datamart Enviornment (TIDE), commonly known as the Terror Watch List, is failing miserably. In theory, the list should take the form of a database that accepts information from a number of government organizations such as the FBI, CIA and National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). It should accept and classify that information in the database, and then allow authorized organizations to query that information.
Unfortunately, the letter says, the database can’t keep up with the data that is being submitted for classification, nor can queries be accurately done on the information already in the system. Furthermore, it lacks the capability to do fuzzy searches, so if my name is on the watchlist, it’s not a big deal because I can just travel under my middle name and get right by. The letter says that the database consists of “463 separate tables, 295 of which are undocumented.” The only way to query it is via SQL commands.
From the lecture: How do people search for information, How can we organize information, What is meaning? Where is meaning? Defining what something means.