Scientist says U.S. ignores terror patent

SANTA FE, N.M., Aug. 4 (UPI) -- A New Mexico computer scientist says his invention would have stopped the Christmas Day bomber in Detroit but he can't get anybody interested in it.

Rob Pecherer of Santa Fe says he has a patent on a system to integrate databases, solving the so-called connect-the-dots problem with identifying terrorists, The (Santa Fe) New Mexican reported Tuesday.

Pecherer says he would be happy to give it to the government to use in counterterrorism.

"The result that I came up with is so fundamental that their people could start using it an hour after I presented it to them," Pecherer said.

Counterterrorism officials have expressed skepticism about Pecherer's system, saying the problem isn't connecting databases but rather wading through the massive amounts of data they contain to identify real from false threats.

"The problem is knowing whether you've got a terrorist in a sea of 'false positives,'" one said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

When Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried unsuccessfully to ignite explosives in his underwear on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Dec. 25, he had been allowed to board even though he was red-flagged because of his activities in Yemen.

Speaking after the incident, President Barack Obama said, "This was not a failure to collect intelligence; it was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had."

The Department of Homeland Security, the National Counterterrorism Center, Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Santa Fe Institute have declined to talk about Pecherer's invention, the New Mexican said.

"It's not that we didn't have the information," one spokeswoman said of the Abdulmutallab case. "We did. We just had so much information it got drowned in just the deluge of information."