November 19, 2002
Who Knows? ... Let's take five with Moira Gunn. This is "Five Minutes".
Technical projects, like any others, can run into trouble. When milestones evaporate and there's no end in sight, the team will announce: We need more resources! We need more time! We need more understanding about how difficult this is! We need more ... well, fill in the blank.
Whether you're management or the customer, you frequently don't know what to do. Do you hold their feet to the fire? Do you call for reinforcements? Do you pull the plug? Do you try to personally figure out exactly what the problem is, or do you give them what they ask for and hope for the best?
It's difficult to decide what to do, since experience tells us that any of these options can succeed as well as fail. And your decision will only become right or wrong after the fact.
So, in these times, when terrorism has become an everyday word, and when federal agencies are asking for escalated powers to protect our security, I find it very hard to answer the question: "What's the right thing to do?"
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In reviewing the Washington sniper case, which demonstrated the complete commitment of our combined local and national police efforts, I was bothered by one very simple fact: the data in all our existing databases is still not cross-referenced.
When the snipers themselves gave away the Montgomery, Alabama connection, it was not until the fingerprint data from that robbery and murder was brought to Washington, D.C. and finally entered into a federal database, that the names of both suspects, and in short order, the license numbers of the driver and their car were unearthed.
Yet these were the critical pieces of information which turned the tide. If the fingerprints were recorded following the September 15th Montgomery incident, why the delay? In simplest terms, Alabama only maintains a statewide crime database. It does not belong to the service which maintains federal information.
No doubt, the reason is funding, or lack of funding, to be precise.
Still, the crucial question remains: If this data had been cross-referenced, could we have intervened earlier?
The answer is clearly, yes.
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On October 3rd, Washington D.C. police pulled the suspect driver over for a minor traffic violation in the very car in question. On October 8th, Baltimore police found the driver sleeping in this very same vehicle, and on October 21st, Virginia police stopped the suspect again in this car for actually running a red light. While desperately looking for the sniper, two separate states as well as the District of Columbia hadn't a clue they were looking him right in the face.
If the information had simply been cross-referenced, the outcome would have been dramatic: As many as 8 people would never have been shot. Even if you only consider the very last traffic stop, one person, Conrad Johnson, a 35-year married man and the father of two, would be alive today.
So, before government agencies ask us for expanded powers, we need to be assured that the data they already have - at every level - is cross-referenced and accessible nationwide. And yes, this will likely require massive funding to accomplish.
The death of Conrad Johnson is a failure of the Information Age, a failure of our responsibility to guardian and respect the power of data.
I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.
