Surveilling statistical 'Samas

["Rob, grandpa of Ryan, Trevor, Devon & Hannah" <rMslade () shaw ca>]

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
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