Slashdot Mirror
Fighting Terrorists Through Software, Anonymously?
Silwenae writes "MSNBC has a story online from this week's Newsweek about Jeff Jonas, founder of System Research and Development. SRD's software attempts to verify a person is who he says he is, and then tries to determine who that person may be connected with. Originally used in casinos, the CIA has invested in SRD for use in the war against terrorism. Apparently, Jonas has developed a system that can anonymize the data being analyzed through hashing, so the government can share this information with the private sector to look for hits, without the private sector seeing the specific data."
Big brother may be watching you, but you have no way of knowing...
... to me at least.
... well - I'm a foreign citizen, so hey presto - enemy combatant.
Which is far more scary
Personally I'd feel more comfortable travelling in China, as I know for a fact what will happen to me, if I were to air my oppinions about their government. In the USA however
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
Can anybody help me and define the limits of the problem "the war against terrorism"?
It strikes much of the issue is defining the problem, hey we're geeks right, give us a spec to build to, yup? This seems to be the chief concern of slashdot posters so far, that the problem has not been bounded and there are varying interpretations being made on what the problem is. How can we define the problem? Or are we accepting that the term is a worthless media and political construct to sell newspapers and justify military/ intelligence spending? Can we frame this fuzzy problem in a more meaningful way?
What's really wonderful is that, since this is a static system, this is still subject to the Carnival Booth terrorist screeing attack which was documented not so long ago and which guarantees that this will reduce and not increase security by allowing terrorists to identify which people they can use to carry out attacks.
Idiots.
The peoples of democratic countries need to wake up to the fact that terrorism represents less of a threat than their own governments' response to it. Even 9/11, the worst terrorist attack in history, did not do much to increase the annual rate of homicides in the US. It remains much more dangerous to cross the street, drive to the supermarket, walk in the hills, or go for a drink on a weekend night (let alone smoking or eating burgers). We need to accept, and insist our governments accept, that there are risks involved in the world, of which terrorism is by no means the greatest, and that these cannot be eliminated while maintining a reasonable quality of life.
The false-positive rate should be emphasized far more than it has been. What does it mean? It means that whatever system they have in place, if it's based on statistical indicators rather than someone's hunch, will inevitably identify several innocent people for every terrorist that they find. Depending on the sensitivity of the detection algoritm, the value of "several" could be anywhere from dozens to thousands. And these people are not "borderline" terrorists in any sense. They are no more likely to be real terrorists than anyone else in the population. They're entirely innocent. So the use of such a system is guaranteed to falsely identify, stigmatize and punish large numbers of innocent people. This is not a tradeoff between freedom and security. It's a tradeoff between justice and the false perception of security.
Get your teeth into a small slice: the cake of liberty