During congressional hearings regarding the intelligence failures of the 9/11 attacks, FBI director Robert S. Mueller indicated that the primary problem the top law enforcement agency in the world had was that it focused too much on dealing with crime after it had been committed and placed too little emphasis on preventing it. The director said the bureau has been too involved in investigating, and not involved enough in analyzing the information its investigators gathered which is what this book is specifically about: the prevention of crime and terrorism before it takes place (precrime), using advanced data mining technologies, tools, and techniques.

The FBI director went on to tell Congress that the bureau would shift its focus from reacting to crime to preventing it, acknowledging that this could be done only with better technology, which, again, is what this book is about, specifically:

• Data integration for access to multiple and diverse sources of information

• Link analysis for visualizing criminal and terrorist associations and relations

• Software agents for monitoring, retrieving, analyzing, and acting on information

• Text mining for sorting through terabytes of documents, Web pages, and e-mails

• Neural networks for predicting the probability of crimes and new terrorist attacks

• Machine-learning algorithms for extracting profiles of perpetrators and graphical maps of crimes

This book strives to explain the technologies and their applications in plain English, staying clear of the math, and instead concentrating on how they work and how they can be used by law enforcement investigators,...