CAPPS II Guidelines Released

W33dz writes "WIRED magazine has released an article detailing the Transportation Safety Administration's latest guidelines for the second-generation Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System, or CAPPS II. As outlined in a notice to be published Friday in the Federal Register, CAPPS II will rate every passenger by checking dates of birth, home addresses and phone numbers against commercial databases and the government's terrorist watch lists. This is a pullback from the original plan which called for wide dissemination of data including financial and medical history."

Comments

False positives

[in7ane]

How are they planning to deal with the large numbers of false positives a system like this will generate? In my experience when you try to predict such low probability events as being a terrorist (no matter what you 'should' believe, even 100,000 terrorists in the US is only 0.0004%) the number of false positives far exceeds the number of true ones (or even the potentially true ones if you picked them all up).

And I really don't think a 'fly' list is the solution - if it automatically lets you fly, and considering that suicide bombers rarely have a history, it would be too obvious a back door.

Ask for a pony

[Ambush]

Now how does that old saying go?

Oh yes... if you want a puppy, start out by asking for a pony.

Of course, this 'puppy' will no doubt grow into quite a large bull-mastif. *sigh*