Index

Plato’s Beard » Bush Tracker

Plato’s Beard » Bush Tracker

Plato’s Beard » Bush Tracker

At CounterPunch, Floyd Rudmin (who I hope to quote a lot of, from what I have seen of his writing) provides a great lesson on Bayes Theorem to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of NSA monitoring with regard to identifying terrorists. But I have some comments, which can be found after the quote below.

I believe this is honest and valid reasoning. However it has to be read closely because Rudmin does not use more familiar terms such as 'false postive' and 'false negative'.

He points out that the chance is very low that a person is actually a terrorist if so identified by NSA. The if-then order here is important to note. Another way to say it is to say that (simply because of the extremely low incident rate of terrorists) there will be a lot of false positives. A lot of people who are not terrorists will be wrongly labelled so by the NSA.

What he does not say or imply, but is not clear (at least in my reading, to a layperson) is that given a high accuracy rate (of the NSA test for terrorist) the chance of a false negative is quite low. In other words, the NSA monitoring (if accurate) will not miss a real terrorist. The if-then here is reversed.

IMHO, this is a crucial difference for two reasons:

The public has demonstrated many times over that they are willing to swallow the fear-mongering and sacrifice significant chunks of liberties (especially if they believe it to be those of others) in return for perceived security and toughness. While Rudmin makes a powerful argument in pointing out that the monitoring does a poorer job than the toss of a coin (given his assumptions on accuracy rate, etc), this argument falls on mostly deaf ears.