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Far From Zero: NSA Chances of Mistakenly Identifying You as a Terrorist Via Mass Surveillance

Excellent short article on the lack of a statistical basis for finding terrorists in a total population by using mass surveillance. Conclusion: the chance of finding a small number of individuals in a large population via large-scale surveillance is approximately zero, with the corollary that the rate of false identifications will be very high. link to article

The good news is that a much higher rate of suspects means that such surveillance will work, albeit not for the original goal. Turns out the systems they are building (ala TIA which still lives on) will function well for things like political espionage. Or maybe they are suspecting a massive fifth column to infiltrate the US in the next year or so and haven't mentioned anything yet...

Posted by Mark Tuesday, July 11, 2006 5:35:00 PM | permalink |