Database lessons from Flight 253

Homeland security is just another area where database information is difficult to track. We all have an irrational hope that computers are magic devices that tell us all the answers, but information is only as good as the people who enter it on to the system, and databases are not good at reflecting nuance or individual workers' meanings.

The scuppered terrorist attack on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 to Detroit was not foiled because of computer efficiency, as Umar Faroukh Abdulmutallab managed to get close to morbid success having passed through customs in Nigeria and Amsterdam. He featured on lists of suspected activists, was denied a Visa to the UK, and was shopped by his own father to the US Authorities.

Intelligence is only as good as the foresight of the people receiving it. Even the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack that brought the USA into World War II might have been averted if intelligence officers had picked up the correct message in among the white noise.

Databases do not predict, they only hold information about what has passed. The security services need to work out new forecasting strategies for second-guessing enemy groups next moves without killing off the general public's ability to use planes, boats and trains with too many counter-terrorism moves.

Databases are useful, however, for finding out the 'current situation'. When databases go wrong, where staff shortages force time-poor workers to rush updating records, any time savings are a false economy as information decreases in accuracy and value. In any organisation, database work is a frontline service.