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False Positives, Few Matches Plague 'No-Fly' List
lindner writes "According to a recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle, the United States No-Fly List uses a soundex algorithm to match names. Designed 'to quickly summon passenger names or to catch deal-hunting passengers making duplicate bookings.' The system has only managed to rack up a slew of false-positives, including everyone matching soundex ("J. Adams") at one point in time. The problem has gotten so bad that there is now a "Fly List" for chronically misidentified passengers."
It should be obvious to anyone that any mechanism designed to target a small group out of a large group will would have to have an extremely small false positive rate to be of any use.
And the false negative rate had better be small, too.
Something 99% accurate is far from good enough; if only 0.01% of possible individuals are actual targets, you'll be getting 100 times as many false positives as correct positives.
Solution is simple. The odds of you being killed in the U.S. by a terrorist is so small that only an ignortant and fearfull population would even worry about it. Just /dev/null wipe hands go to bed.
The system relies on a false premise. Terrorists don't have "careers" anymore. If you were planning a terrorist attack, you could easily find 20 guys with no records whose names appear on no lists in any form. Recruiting people for suicide terrorist activities has become very easy as of late. (I can't say why or I'll be attracting a bunch of AC replies from dittoheads.)
This is a system designed to give you a false sense of security. It bothers and harasses people so much that they feel safe when they get on the plane (if the plane doesn't leave before they get through the bullshit). It will not stop the next hijacking at all- although it strongly discourages discretionary air travel, and is rapidly destroying the airline industry.
We should go back to the system we had before 9/11, that served us well for many years. Terrorists may still be able to crash airplanes, but they will no longer succeed in crashing airplanes into buildings. Now that everyone knows how that type of attack works, it is unlikely to succeed again. Note how it didn't even succeed once they got wind of it via cellphone during that flight over Pennsylvania.
But since the public has it in their head that terrorism can be magically prevented at the airport somehow, we should put up some sort of pretense for them at the security checkpoint and the gate. I'm thinking about some sort of prop that you would see Scotty using on Star Trek- a sort of stick with colored lights inside that you wave over a person. If they're a terrorist, the lights turn red and the stick makes a funny sort of buzzing noise. That way we could wave people through, and have them convinced that they've been inconvenienced enough to be safe.
One of the major clinical automation systems used in American hospitals uses soundex as a primary matching algorithm for patient lookups in the admitting department. Everyone is smart enough not to use it for names like "Juan Garza," but for names like "Steve Franklin" the chance of getting false-positives on your search algorithm is REALLY high. This is largely because of how the system itself implements things.
Two notable occasions have occured where patients were admitted as the incorrect "Steve Franklin" (name make up for use here, of course). Needless to say, this might be a bit of a problem when the medical and nursing staff then takes that admission record and looks back at labs, radiographs, and such ON THE WRONG PATIENT.
Of course, this same "highly advanced" system is really just a set of SQL tables that don't even use variable lengths for fields like comments (instead restricting the user to something obscene like 38 characters). The user interface is really just a Curses program that reads the columns on the table and displays them, allowing the user to edit them. Nearest I can tell, SQL functions handle all the data verification and such, and don't even do a good job at it.
I've worked with this computer system for four years, suffering through it's stupidity.
The point is that one should never assume that sucky, disgusting software is written by first year comp sci majors. There are enough professional programmers out there to cause a far bigger disaster.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups, or in corporate culture.
Who cares what algorithm they use? Why someone would support a 'No Fly' database is beyond me.
I think people are either criminal (means they should be kept in prison) or not.
Guys like you make me really afraid. For you it's only a technical problem, is it?
You US folks could really do with a constitution to stop this sort of crap happening. Oh wait, you do have one. Oh well, back to the drawing board. Land of the free indeed.
In the US, more people are killed in car accidents _every month_ than were killed in the attacks on the WTC. Even a tiny 2% decrease in the number of car-accident deaths would save more lives every decade than were lost in all terrorist attacks the US has ever suffered.
Over the last 10 years, an American's odds of dying in a terrorist attack are about 1 in 100,000. That's less than your odds of drowning in your own bathtub, less than your odds of drinking yourself to death, and less than your odds of accidentally suffocating in your own bed! (http://www.nsc.org/lrs/statinfo/odds.htm)
Frankly, the current atmosphere of fear of terrorism is little more than hysteria. Why on earth aren't we showing the world we have some balls and are strong enough to not let a few terrorists make us live in fear? If you live in fear or give up freedoms, you've let the terrorists win!