mo Why's a Retired Army Lieutenant Colonel on the"No-Fly" List?]]

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [IP] mo Why's a Retired Army Lieutenant Colonel on
the"No-Fly" List?]
Date: Mon, 27 Feb 2006 06:01:18 -0600
From: Tom Fairlie <tfairlie () frontiernet net>
To: dave () farber net
CC: krulwich () yahoo com
References: <4402E394.1030701 () farber net>

Bruce,

Don't your scientific methodologies go out the proverbial
window when the President's team is hand-picking certain
individuals to be on the list? I'm sure we all realize that any
system such as that employed by the TSA will have problems.
However, while these problems may exist (and may be quite
large in scale or scope), they pale in comparison to the more
capricious examples of NFOBs (non-friends of Bush) being
manually placed on the no-fly lists as punishment. This makes
the debate over the dangers of other systems (e.g., TIA) kind
of moot in my eyes; we can already guess how theses systems
are ultimately going to be used.

Tom Fairlie

----- Original Message -----
From: "Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>
To: <ip () v2 listbox com>
Sent: Monday, February 27, 2006 5:33 AM
Subject: [IP] mo Why's a Retired Army Lieutenant Colonel on the"No-Fly"
List?]


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [IP] Why's a Retired Army Lieutenant Colonel on the"No-Fly"
List?
Date: Sun, 26 Feb 2006 23:13:35 -0800 (PST)
From: Krulwich <krulwich () yahoo com>
Reply-To: krulwich () yahoo com
To: dave () farber net

Dave, this is the wrong criticism.  Scientifically, from the perspective of
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (my PhD area), any good
methodology that attempts to inductively generalize from a sample set to
predictions of future set membership, or to deductively generalize from
a set
of criteria describing a sample set to predictions of future set membership,
is going to have false positives and false negatives.  Any methodology that
had zero false positives and false negatives would be so limited as to be
useless.

To put this in non-scientific terms, the only way to 100% avoid false
identifications is to have the system so limited as to be useless, like
saying
"suspect someone only if they're carrying fuse wire and muttering 'allah
akbhar' under their breath."  On the other hand, the only way to 100% avoid
missing anyone is to have the system so broad that it's useless because it
suspects everyone, like saying "suspect everyone unless they're wearing a
purple heart and have had their picture on TV shaking the President's
hand."
Any system that attempts to do something intelligent will inherently
have some
mistakes in both directions.

That said, there are clear ways to evaluate such methodologies.  What
percentage of predicted group memberships are clearly wrong?  What
percentage
of obvious examples that should be suspected are in fact suspected?

But finding one example, even a prominent example, is scientifically not a
reason to reject a methodology.

--Bruce


--- Dave Farber <dave () farber net> wrote:

> http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat?pid=63406
>
> The federal officials who are busy assuring Americans that they've got 
> their
> act together when it comes to managing port security are not inspiring 
> much
> confidence with their approach to airline security.
>
> When Dr. Robert Johnson, a heart surgeon who did his active duty with the
> U.S. Army Reserve before being honorably discharged with the rank of
> Lieutenant Colonel, arrived at the Syracuse airport near his home in 
> upstate
> New York last month for a flight to Florida, he was told he could not
> travel.
>
> Why? Johnson was told that his name had been added to the federal "no-fly"
> list as a possible terror suspect.
>
> Johnson, who served in the military during the time of the first Gulf War
> and then came home to serve as northern New York's first board-certified
> thoracic surgeon and an active member of the community in his hometown of
> Sackets Harbor, is not a terror suspect. But he is an outspoken critic of
> the war in Iraq, who mounted a scrappy campaign for Congress as the
> Democratic challenger to Republican Representative John McHugh in 2004 and
> who plans to challenge McHugh again in upstate New York's sprawling 23rd
> District.
>
> Johnson, who eventually made it onto the flight to Florida, is angry.
>
> And, like a growing number of war critics whose names have ended up on
> "no-fly" lists - some of them prominent, many of them merely concerned
> citizens - he wants some answers.
>
> ...
>
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