Collate Info from Spy Agencies -- the Way Marketers Do

This Holiday Season, as we all dish on whether we will be forced to go commando on flights in order to prevent any more undie bombers, or whether we will inflict terror on poor TSA agents by parading starkers through body scans, I can't help but wonder why our spy agencies aren't enlisting the same tools marketers have at their disposal.

For instance, folks at Nielsen's Buzz Metrics and Evolve 24 have been collating what people say and do in media and blogs, with how product sales and/or stock prices will perform. They ingest literally millions of articles and blog posts every single day, parse by clients (and their competitors), and look for sentiment toward each subject. They then can predict, with a fair degree of certainty, the outcome of key performance indicators. By semantically analyzing and collating "buzz" about brands -- can't these same agencies do this with "chatter" about targets?

Maybe I am missing something here, but if Amazon has powerful relational databases to know that if I bought a Sony Minicam a year -- I just might want a tripod this year, why can't our spy agencies put together that studying Arabic in Yemen + attending a highly-watched Islamic Center in London + buying a ticket (extra points if paid with cash) + traveling with no baggage on a trip to the US (Detroit, I might add, where the average temperature is below freezing -- did he even have a coat?) -- adds up to "likely candidate to blow up a plane?" At the very least, he deserves extra screening. (I cross at the US/Canadian borders at least monthly and have found some very well-skilled interrogators who ask off-handed, yet key questions focused on my rationale for crossing: what will the temperature in Montreal be this week? Who pitched for the Yankees and Blue Jays? If I don't have an answer -- I should be pulled over.)

While screening air passengers to that level of detail may be difficult (if keeping the airline industry aloft is at all a goal), certainly we should be able to winnow the list from the millions who fly to the thousands who deserve extra scrutiny. Where are the econometricians, the semantic analysts, the library scientists that do Boolean queries?  Maybe the TSA needs a CMO to show how to really build a profile that is predictive.