Blog: Jill Dyche

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Foreign Keys: Building a Terrorist Database

In which Jill gets circumspect about a career-changing project.

I’ve never written about this before. In the late 1980s, I worked in Germany on a project with the goal of tracking terrorists.

Back then I had both the physical and intellectual stamina required of a system engineer for a start-up database vendor, often dispatched to far-flung locales with a day’s notice to help make a database go faster or help a customer with some new product feature. When my boss told me to be in Wiesbaden on Thursday to “help a new customer integrate its data models,” I bought a book on the Rhein-Main region, studied up on the vernacular, and booked my ticket.

The Bundeskriminalamt is German amalgam of the FBI and the CIA. The bright, airy layout of its Wiesbaden headquarters belied the serious work that went on inside. In an architectural flourish that in retrospect was counterintuitive, the BundesKriminalAmt building was walled with windows. The outside of the building was surrounded by glass so expansive that black bird decals were pasted across it in intervals so the crows wouldn’t fly into the structure and knock themselves unconscious, or worse.

I remember entering the massive building every day, enduring the same line of questioning and briefcase search from stern security personnel, and handing over my U.S. passport, which I retrieved promptly at six o’clock before the shift change.

I was there to integrate disparate database designs, some hierarchical, some flat files, none of them matching, into a single relational model. It wasn’t the standard bill-of-materials project or even one of the customer models we’d recently begun working on for our clients. This was a terrorist database, one intended to interconnect the various police stations throughout Germany via a network of common information about terrorists. The data involved border crossings, Visa numbers, and aliases. Back in the days of manual data profiling, we discovered data elements like “S.A.S” and “Kalashnikov.”

My project was explained to me with the matter-of-fact demeanor associated with German efficiency. I worked with a team of focused professionals, all of us charged with deconstructing the various files from the disparate police stations and building a common model. We worked hard and deliberately, in the German fashion. Our boss, Herr Lietz, a lifelong civil servant, occasionally invited me home for dinner with his family, all of whom politely ate in the Continental style, knife in the right hand, fork on the left. Herr Lietz was gracious and smart. He kept his secrets to himself.

After work I’d sit on my bed at the Hotel Schwarzer Bock idly watching German talk shows and mulling over the information we were gathering. I’d wake up early and have a prototypical breakfast of fruit, muesli, and quark (an enduring love my hips resent). On weekends I would take the train to Baden-Baden or visit friends in Strasbourg, where we would dine in the shadow of the cathedral and debate our differences.

On reflection, I was hyper-intent on the job at hand but oblivious to its foreshadowing. None of us could have imagined that Germany would be the incubator of an organized plot against the West, or that terrorist cells in Hamburg would be directly linked to a tragedy on the scale of 9/11. I was laying the foundation for new information, proselytizing my belief in the relational model, building a data dictionary from scratch. I was representing my company, delivering then-new data warehouse technology that would make the information so much easier for non-technicians to access and understand. I was determined to complete attribute lists, represent roles, and avoid dangling foreign keys. I was twenty six years old.

Technorati tags: CDI, data reconciliation, data modeling

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