What's your "TQ"?

That's "terrorism quotient"--also known as "High Terrorism Factor," or HTF. The AP reported on May 20 that Seisint, a federal contractor employed by the Bush administration to develop the Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange (MATRIX), "turned over to U.S. and Florida authorities the names of 120,000 people who showed a statistical likelihood of being terrorists--sparking some investigations and arrests."

After 9-11, Seisint used a scoring algorithm to trawl through personal data collected on millions of people to identify those displaying HTF. The system was based on "reverse engineering an unnamed 'Terrorist Handbook' that reveals how terrorists 'penetrate and live in our society.' The scoring incorporated such factors as age, gender, ethnicity, credit history, 'investigational data,' information about pilot and drivers licenses, and connections to 'dirty' addresses known to have been used by other suspects."

Seisint turned over 120,000 names with the highest scores to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, FBI, Secret Service and Florida state police. Of those with the 80 highest scores, five were among the 9-11 hijackers.

According to Bruce Edwards, an adviser to the federal Office of Justice Programs, when the scoring mechanism used by Seisint is applied to the general criminal population it "yields people that may have similar motives" to those of the 9-11 terrorists. One problem, however, is that terrorists in sleeper cells generally avoid committing crimes that would identify themselves as part of the "general criminal population." Another problem is that the profiling methods used by Seisint are meant to be applied to the non-criminal population as well.

On the strength of its performance, and with the apparent endorsement of Vice President Cheney, Seisint was appointed sole data contractor on the MATRIX program in May 2003. As we have previously noted (see "Into the Matrix" in our February 23 issue), former Utah Governor Mike Leavitt, now director of the EPA, played a critical role in enlisting more than a dozen states to enroll in the MATRIX. Without properly notifying the Utah legislature, Leavitt signed the state up for the program. Utah and at least eight other states have left the MATRIX, leaving Florida, Connecticut, Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania on board.