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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsRosa Luxemburg
(28,627 posts)Hmmmm!
Lots of information about hockey scores, online purchases of prom dresses and old ladies knitting patterns.
Pholus
(4,062 posts)Terrorists are rare. To estimate the number of actual killer terrorists in the country (most of whom haven't actually done anything yet) let's estimate 9/11 as a major effort that used perhaps 10% of them. That would give us 200 committed terrorists in the population.
Let's say that the NSA created an incredible technique that is accurate at identifying a terrorist in collected (sorry "touched" info 99.9% of the time. That is probably much better than what can be accomplished to be honest.
The 99.9% success rate means they would find almost all 200 terrorists easily: (0.999 * 200) = 199.8.
But the algorithm also fails 0.1% of the time. In the US population of 316 million that means that (0.001 * 316 million) = 316000 Americans falsely under suspicion as well.
In the end, a given person fingered by a 99.9% accurate algorithm as a terrorist would only be guilty 0.06% of the time.
This seems to have been understood after 9/11....
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/politics/17spy.html?oref=login
Rosa Luxemburg
(28,627 posts)minimal funding for traffic calming yet billions for catching 2 terrorists