Stumble it!Be afraid. Toss your liberties. Trust me.
posted in Politics, Terrorism by themaiden |The odds?
Even if terrorists were able to pull off one attack per year on the scale of the 9/11 atrocity, that would mean your one-year risk would be one in 100,000 and your lifetime risk would be about one in 1300. (300,000,000 ÷ 3,000 = 100,000 ÷ 78 years = 1282) In other words, your risk of dying in a plausible terrorist attack is much lower than your risk of dying in a car accident, by walking across the street, by drowning, in a fire, by falling, or by being murdered.
And for this we’ve decided to toss civil liberties and human rights?
For this we’ve started the slow gutting of the constitution?
For this we’ve begun removing the only reasons that the United States is worth preserving?
For this we’ve decided to burn billions and destroy a country (that is, if you actually believe that we went to Iraq because of terrorism)?
Right wing pundits like to talk about bravery and resolve, pride and principle, strength and determination. Frankly, ’strong and brave’ would mean standing for principle in the face of the dangers. Gutting the principle out of fear is either 1) cowardly or 2) a fabulous power play for elements more interested in control than in democracy, freedom, or liberty. Cowering under these odds is shameful.
Bruce Schneier, in How Not to Catch Terrorists, talks about a different, but related, set of odds. Noting that data mining has had some success stories, Schneier considers its application to terror investigation.
Data mining for terrorists: It’s an idea that just won’t die. But it won’t find any terrorists, it puts us at greater risk of crimes like identity theft, and it gives the police far too much power in a free society.
….
Let’s look at some numbers. Assume an unrealistically optimistic system with a 1-in-100 false positive rate (99% accurate), and a 1-in-1,000 false negative rate (99.9% accurate). That is, while it will mistakenly classify something innocent as a terrorist plot one in a hundred times, it will only miss a real terrorist plot one in a thousand times. Assume one billion possible “plots” to sift through per year, about four per American citizen, and that there is one actual terrorist plot per year.
Even this unrealistically accurate system will generate 10 million false alarms for every real terrorist plot it uncovers. Every day of every year, the police will have to investigate 270,000 potential plots in order to find the one real terrorist plot per month.
Did you notice that by Schneier’s estimate the system will return plots enough to justify investigating each American citizen four times per year if spread evenly across the population?
Also note that given that there are around 950,000 people employed by the various police forces in the United States– and certainly not all of those are actually police officers– Schneier’s numbers mean that around one in three cops would be occupied with terror investigations every day. That kind of strain would crush an already overloaded system. I guess we could bring in the army to help out, right?
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