the fields of Data Visualization and information architecture, having to outsource such services to private cyber-savvy firms while the federal bureaucracy threw millions of dollars and lost time at the issue.
For Jack and Gavin Biery, the project they eventually dubbed PLOWSHARE began as a technical challenge: how to take the flood of open-source information on the Internet and beat it into something useful—a sword with which they could pare down the overload. The slightly overwrought metaphor notwithstanding, they made rapid progress, starting with a software program designed to gather obituaries from the eastern seaboard and map them according to various groupings: age, location, cause of death, vocation, etc. Many of the patterns that emerged were predictable—such as elderly deaths clustered around retirement homes—but some were not, such as the recent raising of the drinking age in one state preceding more young-adult deaths on highways leading to a nearby state with a lower drinking age. This, too, was somewhat predictable, they admitted, but seeing the clusters on the map was the proverbial picture that paints a thousand words.
The other surprise was the depth and scope of open-source information. The truly useful data, while not inaccessible, were tucked away deep within local, state, and federal government websites, available to anyone with enough patience and technological literacy to find it. Second and Third World countries, the ones in which most terrorist incidents took place, were the easiest prey, often failing to close the gap between online record-keeping and online database security. Otherwise confidential information such as arrest reports and investigatory case files were stored in unsecured servers without so much as a firewall or password between them and government website portals.
And such was the case with Libya. Within four hours of getting the go-ahead from Hendley, Jack and Gavin had PLOWSHARE chewing on gigabytes of data from both open-source and government databases. Two hours after that, PLOWSHARE regurgitated the information onto Gavin’s hacked copy of Google Earth Pro. Jack called Hendley, Granger, Rounds, and the Caruso brothers into the dimmed conference room. The PLOWSHARE-ENHANCED satellite view of tripoli was overlaid with crisscrossing multicolored lines, clusters, and squares. Jack stood by the LCD screen with remote in hand; Biery sat in the back against the wall, his laptop open on his legs.
“Looks like a Jackson Pollock painting,” Brian observed. “You trying to give us a seizure, Jack?”
“Bear with me,” Jack replied, then touched a button on the remote. The “data tracery,” as he and Gavin had come to call it, disappeared. Jack gave the group a five-minute primer on PLOWSHARE, then touched the remote again. The image zoomed in on the Tripoli airport, which was now overlaid with what looked like the head of a flower, its center a stigma divided into colored pie slices, its petals squared off and of various lengths.
“The stigma represents average arrival volume per day. Mornings are busiest; afternoons the slowest. The petals represent average number of special searches conducted at airport checkpoints. As you can see, there’s a spike in the mornings, from seven to ten, and a drop-off the closer you move toward noon. Translation: Thursdays between ten-thirty and noon are the best times to try to sneak something through the screeners.”
“Why?” asked Granger.
“The checkpoints are fully manned in the morning, but personnel are rotated through lunch breaks in late morning; less staff plus more transitions equals less security. Plus, almost two-thirds of the screeners and security guards work Sundays through Thursdays.”
“So Thursdays are their Fridays,” Dominic said. “Already thinking about the weekend.”
Jack nodded. “That’s what we thought. We’ve also got a corresponding departures graph. Might be of more use to you.”
Jack cycled through a series of colored overlays depicting traffic patterns, acts of violence, kidnappings, raids conducted by both police and military units, anti-Western demonstrations . . . all categorized by dates and times, demographics, neighborhoods, ethnicity, foreign involvement, religious and political affiliations, until finally summarizing the data into a “do’s and don’ts” for Brian and Dominic: areas to avoid, and at what times of the day, neighborhoods in which they were likely to find strong URC support, streets on which military checkpoints and police raids were most common.
“Jack, this is great stuff,” Brian commented. “Kind of our own bizarro Frommer’s guidebook.”
“How much does the data vary?” This from Dominic.
“Not by much. There’s some fluctuation on and around major Islamic observances, but unless you stay more than ten days or so, you won’t encounter any of it.”
Granger asked, “Can they access this in the field?”