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To anybody who remembers two planes that mysteriously crashed after leaving Egyptian airports in the past 12 months, the fact that Omar Mateen was a licensed security guard ought to set off alarm bells. One or both planes are thought to have been brought down by Islamic State bombs planted by runway workers.

Mateen worked for G4S Security, a global security firm staffed largely by ex-U.S. and British military. Just days before his deadly rampage in Orlando, a Government Accountability Office report chided federal efforts to control a potential terrorist threat from “rogue aviation workers” at airports. Tens of thousands of people, vetted and approved by companies like G4S, are baggage handlers, etc. G4S itself provides airport and port security around the world.

Mateen had been employed by the firm for nine years. He was a professional, in some sense, given firearms training, licensed and vetted by the state of Florida as well as his employer, which reportedly applied a standard psychometric test when he was hired.

Which brings us to a question: What are we getting from government investment in big data? People in such lines of work presumably sacrifice some of their privacy in order to qualify for their jobs.

A former co-worker claims he complained repeatedly about Mateen’s violent threats and bigotry. The FBI interviewed Mateen twice, once in connection with co-worker complaints, once because a Florida acquaintance became a suicide bomber in Syria. The FBI even put him on a terrorist watch list for 10 months. Mateen’s father is a YouTube gadfly who likes to mix it up in the domestic politics of his native Afghanistan. Mateen’s first wife fled, complaining of violent and deranged behavior. Mateen himself was apparently a user of gay dating apps and frequenter of the club he later shot up. Then, a few days before the attack, he presented himself to a federally licensed firearms dealer to buy an assault rifle.

This week Microsoft bought LinkedIn so it could integrate the social media site’s biographical data on 433 million professionals and workers with Microsoft’s office products, presumably to cough up for the benefit of users information about the people they are collaborating and communicating with in their jobs. To some, this will seem creepy. But the information is voluntarily offered by people hoping to advance their careers and connections. The algorithm doesn’t have prurient motives.

And the information exists, whether you like it or not. A recent study found a non-negligible correlation between a person’s web-search history and whether he will later be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. So here’s the question: Why aren’t LinkedIn-style notifications dinging on the desktops and phones of security officials when somebody with Mateen’s professional history shows up for a background check to buy a weapon of mass murder with numerous ammo clips?

President Obama refrains from emphasizing the role of Islamic radicalism as Mateen’s professed motivation. The problem, of course, is that such sentiments are vital data. His father understood the relevance, insisting he is surprised to hear his son harbored such notions.

Americans accept that government can’t keep them perfectly safe. They accept that freedom to gather in a public place comes with a certain risk. But if the government shows itself unreasonably hindered by political correctness, the public will turn to a Donald Trump.

Civil libertarians especially need some creative rethinking. The FBI currently relies on seeking out Americans who profess jihadist sympathies to see if they can be induced by undercover informants into acting on their claimed beliefs. This irks civil-liberties advocates, who see entrapment. But, to boot, it’s also inefficient, like trying to randomly hook the rare genuine threat rather than setting up an information net into which all such threats must naturally swim.

Officials in the Defense Department after 9/11 tried to bring these techniques to bear, in a package called Total Information Awareness. But public discussion has been distorted by the image of pasty-faced bureaucrats trolling through your emails. In fact, there would be plenty of scope for legal protections in determining how flagged data would be presented to security officials (and a judge) for further action.

President Obama wants to change the subject to guns. Fine—show us you have the votes (even Democraticvotes) to ban an American citizen with no criminal record or history of mental instability from buying a firearm.

The problem is growing. By the count of David Inserra of the Heritage Foundation, there have been 22 successful or interrupted terrorist plots in the U.S. since 2015. Sadly, a few Orlando-style killing sprees would throw the country into turmoil. Big-data techniques are our best hope, even if it requires a new version of the federal 9/11 commission to clear the political ground for it.

This article was originally published on www.wsj.com and can be viewed in full

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