Why government search engines can’t handle misspellings

In my post Thursday on the failure to connect the dots pointing to the underpants bomber (can dots point?), I declared without offering any evidence that:

Any halfway affluent individual can assemble a better set of communication devices and networks on her own than she’d ever get from the IT department of a large corporation (or large government agency).

Well here’s Noah Schachtmann at Wired’s Danger Room riffing (via Boing Boing) on the Obama administration’s report on what went wrong:

Government search tools weren’t even flexible enough to handle simple misspellings. As the White House review notes:

Time to revisit the terrorism futures market?

I’ve already shared Sam Savage’s take on the failure to keep the underpants bomber from getting on that plane to Detroit: that it’s just really really really hard to identify a vanishingly small segment of the population and keep them off airplanes without mistakenly preventing scads of harmless people from boarding. But there are other [...]

How to catch terrorists (and lots and lots of non-terrorists)

A passage from chapter 36 of Sam Savage’s excellent book The Flaw of Averages: So how many true terrorists do you think are currently in the United States? … I have no idea myself, but for the sake of argument, suppose there are 3,000. That is, in the total U.S. population of 300 million, one [...]