nigerian unnamed, unidentified, but a nigerian nonetheless, training in yemen with al qaeda on the air bran peninsula. we heard separately of plans for a christmas time attack on the united states and again separately we knew of a reported telephone intercept that identified a man named omar far uch without his last name as a terrorist. all those dots were on the same table but our government was unable to connect them. in that sense to separate that information out of the enormous massive information our government collects and shares so that this terrorist could be stopped before he acted. we were just plain lucky as we said over and over again that the device he had on him did not effectively explode on that plane. in our first hearing, the director of the national counter terrorism center acknowledged that the center's information collection and sharing systems need to be smarter, as he put it. and i would add that in an era when google, for instance, can aggregate information for anybody who goes on google, anybody, from scores of web sites and data bases throughout the world, very quickly, it's