funsec mailing list archives
Surveilling statistical 'Samas
From: "Rob, grandpa of Ryan, Trevor, Devon & Hannah" <rMslade () shaw ca>
Date: Tue, 11 Jul 2006 14:21:19 -0800
Amidst all the furor over surveillance, legalities, and political machinations, I have failed to be impressed by any indication that wiretapping and so forth was catching terrorists. Now there is an indication as to why this is the case: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/07/terrorists_data.html "Suppose that NSA's system is really, really, really good, really, really good, with an accuracy rate of .90, and a misidentification rate of .00001, which means that only 3,000 innocent people are misidentified as terrorists. With these suppositions, then the probability that people are terrorists given that NSA's system of surveillance identifies them as terrorists is only p=0.2308, which is far from one and well below flipping a coin. NSA's domestic monitoring of everyone's email and phone calls is useless for finding terrorists. "As an exercise to the reader, you can use the same analysis to show that data mining is an excellent tool for finding stolen credit cards, or stolen cell phones. Data mining is by no means useless; it's just useless for this particular application." ====================== (quote inserted randomly by Pegasus Mailer) rslade () vcn bc ca slade () victoria tc ca rslade () computercrime org I once sent a dozen of my friends a telegram saying FLEE AT ONCE - ALL IS DISCOVERED. They all left town immediately. - Mark Twain Dictionary of Information Security www.syngress.com/catalog/?pid=4150 http://victoria.tc.ca/techrev/rms.htm _______________________________________________ Fun and Misc security discussion for OT posts. https://linuxbox.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/funsec Note: funsec is a public and open mailing list.
Current thread:
- Surveilling statistical 'Samas Rob, grandpa of Ryan, Trevor, Devon & Hannah (Jul 11)
- Re: Surveilling statistical 'Samas Brian Loe (Jul 12)