face recognition flop why do I not believe this

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: "David P. Reed" <dpreed () reed com>
Date: July 26, 2007 2:15:33 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Cc: ip () v2 listbox com
Subject: Re: [IP] Re: face recognition flop why do I not believe this

If you have a 0.1% false positive rate, you will also have the  
problem that I saw in my service on a Massachusetts Grand Jury.   You  
end up with 5 presumptive bad guys out of every 5000 screened, which  
makes the crowd anxious.   Something must be happening here ... where  
there's smoke there must be fire.   Crowd gets anxious.   Must find  
at least one guy guilty or we can't relax because one of those guys  
must be a real bad guy - we can't just put them back on the street.
You end up with people very happy to go along with anything the  
authorities say - I mean they are clearly protecting us from those  
people who "fail" the face recognition test, and there are lots of  
them, evidently.   Don't tell me about false positive - it's  
scientific and peer reviewed so something is happening.   It's  
probably the one of the 5 who has dark skin and is really scared  
looking.



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