In the aftermath of September 2001, many groups have offered advice on how to prevent the next such attack. The six of us who have written this piece are unusual in that together we have more than 200 years' hands-on work in national-security affairs, intelligence, law enforcement, counter-terrorism, espionage; counter-intelligence and the legal issues affecting those disciplines. Much post-attack recrimination has focused on failures of "communication and information sharing" among the CIA, the FBI and the National Security Agency, and on a lack of effective analysis―in common parlance, an inability "to connect the dots". There certainly was a lack of dot-connecting before September 11th, but more important was the fact that the blizzard of information available for analysis was of such poor quality. There were too few useful dots.
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