Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Super-Duper

No matter how sophisticated and super-duper are NSA's methods for identifying terrorists, no matter how big and fast are NSA's computers, NSA's accuracy rate will never be 100% and their misidentification rate will never be 0%. That fact, plus the extremely low base-rate for terrorists, means it is logically impossible for mass surveillance to be an effective way to find terrorists.

Schneier on Security: Terrorists, Data Mining, and the Base Rate Fallacy

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