Despite 7.5 years of search­ing, Team Amer­ica still hasn’t found the world’s top crim­i­nal. A recent paper by some UCLA folks (“Find­ing Osama bin Laden: An Appli­ca­tion of Bio­geo­graphic The­o­ries and Satel­lite Imagery”) pro­poses a sim­ple but clever GIS-based approach to map­ping the prob­a­bil­ity of Bin Laden’s pres­ence. The paper depends on a lot of assump­tions but most of them seem rea­son­able based on what lit­tle infor­ma­tion is known to the pub­lic. Just ten years ago the spe­cial­ized data needed to solve these prob­lems was exclu­sively avail­able to the mil­i­tary, but thanks to com­mer­cial satel­lite imagery and the Inter­net, acad­e­mia can now do a pretty cred­i­ble job. I’m curi­ous what US intel­li­gence thinks of all this. (And, I won­der, will they knock on any of the three doors iden­ti­fied by the algo­rithm in Parachi­nar, Pakistan?)