The US Military and Good Old Fashioned Police Work

We really have become the world's police.  Good grief.  And yet, good for the military for taking a leaf out of the police playbook.  Excerpt:

The recent raid on Osama bin Laden's hideout in Pakistan yielded, as expected, a massive amount of data. Anyone with any connection to al Qaeda, and particularly bin Laden, knew what that meant. In short, you had better run, and stay away from anyone else so connected, until the aftereffects of all this damaging data have run its course. This is all because of what happened in Iraq. Most Americans are not aware of this intelligence angle, but the word has gotten around in terrorist circles. It works like this.

In the last five years, counter-terror operations in Iraq were increasingly concentrating on chasing down specific terrorists and their organizations. The amount of intelligence residing in databases, plus the daily flow of new information made it possible to track terrorist cells and chase after them with high confidence that they would be caught. There were a lot of Islamic terrorists out there in Iraq, but by 2007 they had to spend most of their time on OpSec (operational security, making sure that they, or their bomb making workshops, are not discovered.)...

The army and marines have been doing the same thing police forces and corporations have been doing for over a decade; taking data from many different sources and quickly sorting out what all the pieces mean. It's called fusion and data mining, and it's a weapon that is having a dramatic impact on what many thought was an unwinnable war...