Spying on 60 million people doesn't add up »

Posted By berkeley 8 months, 1 week ago in Political News
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This week Sir David Omand, the former Whitehall security and intelligence co-ordinator, described how the state should analyse data about individuals in order to find terrorist suspects: travel information, tax, phone records, emails, and so on. "Finding out other people's secrets is going to involve breaking everyday moral rules," he said, because we'll need to screen everyone to find the small number of suspects.

There is one very significant issue that will always make data mining unworkable when used to search for terrorist suspects in a general population, and that is what we might call the "baseline problem": even with the most brilliantly accurate test imaginable, your risk of false positives increases to unworkably high levels, as the outcome you are trying predict becomes rarer in the population you are examining.

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If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. Of all the enemies to public ...

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    myfairlady8 months, 1 week ago

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    This article misses the point although it is accurate enough - the purpose of police trawls through a population is to intimidate that population - very few criminals are caught this way.

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      Mutainia8 months, 1 week ago

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      It adds up IF they want to control you.

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        jordan118 months, 1 week ago

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        That we're even having this discussion shows how far we've drifted from our Constitution, and allowed government to make things up as they go along. Quite appalling, really.

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