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Feds Undertaking Massive Passenger Profiling Plan
Logic Bomb writes: "The Washington Post is running an overview of a rather big-brother-ish airline passenger screening system the government is proposing. Keeping track of people's ticket purchases is one thing, but correlating people's addresses and living arrangements...! This attempt seems closer to completion and implementation than any other that's been proposed so far."
At least in the US theres the opportunity of throwing out unconstitutional laws when theres a less hand picked supreme court.
I specifically qualified that I believed the quote to be inaccurate. Thanks for correcting me, however, as the proper quote still applies.
Fraud and deceit are harsh words - and indicate that I wished to mislead - if you'd read my statement, you'd realize that this is not the case.
So, using your corrected (and presumably correct) version:
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
This absolutely applies here. People are arguing that they should surrender essential liberties in order to obtain perceived safety (and perhaps a marginal improvement thereof).
Don't pick nits with a quote that I prequalified as likely incorrect - it was the sentiment that I wished to convey, not because I find it useful that Mr. Franklin held these views, but rather because I hold them and his words (paraphrased perhaps) were a useful way to articulate it.
I find it interesting that you can discern great ignorance on my part simply from a misquote.
-- "Other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?"
Say I have a dependent variable called "did a crazy, evil thing." Now I have dozens of independent variables called "income," "purchase behavior," etc. How many positive cases do I have on the "did a crazy, evil thing" variable? Let's assume that the FBI won't just leak all their investigative data into this system (which would permanently blow those investigations). So that means we have what, like 100 million people with negative scores on the "did a crazy, evil thing" variable, and like 30 ppl with positive scores?
The statistics suck here, folks, you will NEVER isolate the variation under these conditions. You'll get millions of innocent people whose patterns among the indep variables match the incredibly thin patterns you get among the terrorists.
This is TOTALLY different from credit analysis schemes where you have like 1/3 or 1/2 of the people in the dataset with occasional or severe credit problems. Modeling really works here b/c a) you have a quantitative measure of the dependent variable (you can smoothly and precisely quantify HOW bad someone's credit is), and b) the dependent variable gives a nice scale with tractable variation, probably one of those infamous bell distributions conveniently around some point (or if you stratify properly you'll find the bells, whatever).
And don't be fooled by the fancy-sounding "neural network" stuff, that's just another modeling technique which loosens a few assumptions. But it does NOT fundamentally change the need to have enough positive cases to balance the variation in the independent variables. And binary dependent variables? Sheesh. BAD DATA! DOWN BOY!
And let's talk for a second about the living arrangement correlation analysis. If someone X has lived with someone Y known to be positive on the "did a crazy, evil thing," variable, I sure as hell hope that someone X was questioned very, very thoroughly by the cops. So what good is this additional profiling??
BTW, I travel internationally with my laptop pretty often. EVERY SINGLE TIME I go through Schipol in Amsterdam they pull me out of the line for ~20 mins of additional questioning. They don't tell me why, but I'm tripping something in their profile. It's not racial, but I think "has been to Bosnia" or something, plus that I have a laptop. They always pester about whether the laptop is mine or my employer's, and being the latter, they are very, very concerned.
Profiling creates millions of false positives, and it is by no means clear that it prevents false negatives.
Merely being constitutional doesn't make it any less of a stupid dangerous idea that won't actually make flying one bit safer. There's no constitutional restriciton against putting police cameras and listening devices in every public place, but it still makes people uncomfortable, for good reason.
Your idea that travel is somehow a privelege, and not a right, is fairly repulsive, too.
--
Benjamin Coates
Next time, why not post a link to the original article rather than post it in its entirety here? For those interested, the article seems to have originally appeard here.