Detection of invisible and crucial events: from seismic fluctuations to the war against terrorism

We argue that the recent discovery of the non-Poissonian statistics of the seismic main-shocks is a special case of a more general approach to the detection of the distribution of the time increments between one crucial but invisible event and the next. We make the conjecture that the proposed approach can be applied to the analysis of terrorist network with significant benefits for the Intelligence Community.