And there has been a human toll: more than half of the pearl farmers in Masaki have been forced out of business since 1988.

CNN: ASIANOW - TIME Asia

The problem is that, as Roberta Wohlstetter pointed out half a century ago in her study of Pearl Harbor, separating out the really important signals from all the "noise" in the system is only easy to do after the fact, particularly when the U.S. government has now assembled a database of an astonishing number of 700, 000 individuals it suspects of ties to terrorism.

CNN: Agencies often miss warning signs of attacks