Captain Ed and AJ Strata have pointed to this quote from General Shelton as an issue:

Shelton, though, said that a CIA representative and an FBI representative were present at the second briefing.

If we’re talking about open sourced data, then almost any nosy but determined neighbor (or stalker) who knows how to use Nexis and Google could find out just about anything about just about anybody.

So can investigators, if they have a name to start with, and they can keep that data in an office file with an individual’s name label until some years hence when it’s moved to a basement storage area or off-site warehouse.

But results of data-mining, which is pretty much a similar search but from the other end (starting from the “what,” “where,” “why” or “how” instead of from the “who”) and which, if fruitful, can turn up entire schemes complete with schemers — but which would be filed under some generic operational label — is somehow too intrusive and violates individual rights?

Yeah. Right.

This document is located at http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/1205/120705nj1.htm

In its futuristic-style building — its interior spaces designed by a Hollywood set artist to mimic the bridge of the starship Enterprise, complete with a large captain’s chair in the center of the main room — the IDC covered a range of topics.

At the IDC, Kleinsmith and three colleagues mapped Al Qaeda for Able Danger by mining open sources and fusing their results with classified government intelligence. But in addition to the mass of information they returned on suspected terrorists, they collected thousands of names of U.S. citizens.

any data the IDC collected on U.S. persons — even inadvertently — had to be destroyed within 90 days. If analysts could establish a legitimate reason to investigate a person further, they could keep the corresponding data.

From then on, U.S. Central Command, responsible for the Middle East, became the IDC’s primary customer, Kleinsmith said. Special Operations Command, unhappy because the IDC’s attention had shifted, moved Able Danger to a private intelligence research center run by Raytheon in Garland, Texas, Kleinsmith said.

Today, Kleinsmith is an employee with Lockheed Martin, working as a contractor to the Army’s Information Operations Center, an IDC spin-off that is chartered to support the global war on terrorism. He oversees an intelligence training team of about 28 instructors, five of whom are working in Iraq to train U.S. analysts in data mining.

So, Gen. Hugh Shelton knew about Able Danger. In fact, he claims that he suggested using data mining…And yet the 9/11 Commission didn’t think this program was worth checking out or including in the final report? I think the Commission gets a failin…

Via AJ Strata, General Hugh Shelton has spoken up about Able Danger:

I have a theory on this as in regards to Bush Admin/Rummy on this. A few weeks ago Rummy was on FOX with Chris Wallace. Wallace asked Rummy. Notice here he corrects the year to an earlier time AND does not rule it out altogether. I suspect the Admin. is playing this carefully. MSM won’t become curious unless the Admin appears to be holding something too close. Once gets the MSM past protecting Clinton and thinks it may hurt Bush they will really start looking at the story. I was particularly interested Rummy went to years earlier.

Here is the transcript

“WALLACE: Finally, I want to ask you about something, and I must say, when I…

RUMSFELD: This is a typical Washington game, isn’t it? You go around to everybody and say what about you, what about you, what about you. He’s really caused a stir. I was in Adelaide, Australia and I read something about this and was amused by it all.

WALLACE: Well, so it’s not just Washington. But let me ask you one last thing. And I have to say, a lot of people wanted me to ask you about this. Able Danger, an intelligence unit in the Pentagon — did they or did they not identify Mohammed Atta and some of the other 9/11 hijackers in the year 2000?

RUMSFELD: There are people that said they did. The year 2000 or earlier? I don’t remember when it was.

WALLACE: No, the year 2000.

RUMSFELD: Was it? I wasn’t in government at the time, obviously.

WALLACE: Right.

RUMSFELD: But there are some people who say that that’s the case. There are other people involved who say it isn’t. And the people in the Pentagon, I’m told, have spent just enormous numbers of hours digging into everything they can find and giving it to the appropriate committees of the Congress, and they have not been able to validate it.

WALLACE: I don’t understand why it’s so complicated. I mean, people are — I mean, it’s a fact. Why wouldn’t you, as the secretary of defense, your people underneath you, be able to find out?

RUMSFELD: They’ve looked and they — you can’t prove a negative. They’ve looked and looked and looked and looked and found everything they could find. Cannot find validation of that, which doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

You say you don’t understand why it can’t be done. But you couldn’t do it either. You can’t prove a negative. All you can say is we’ve looked and looked and looked. We can’t say it didn’t happen, but we also don’t have evidence that it did.”

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,176148,00.html