Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World Highlight

On 9/11, a pretty good national identity database existed, but it was private, not public, and Acxiom’s clients used it to target suckers for catalogs and telemarketing calls, not to predict terrorist activity. That idea doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone involved until after the Twin Towers were down. Once they were, Acxiom searched its files and found it had a bunch of information on the hijackers, including so many inconsistencies that in theory the authorities could have been able to tell in advance that the men were up to something, had anyone been looking. As Robert O’Harrow reports in his book on the growth of twenty-first-century surveillance, No Place to Hide: Behind the Scenes of Our…