Doonesbury Say What?

Don't the campaigns do fact-checking before they write sound bites for their candidates, or do they just not care? You'd think that for as long as McCain has been in office that they'd have a staff dedicated to finding out whether he's about to contradict himself, because there are a lot of people online who have access to the same info who would love to see it happen.

"Tragically, the U.S. response to the 1998 embassy bombings was wholly inadequate...Too many Clinton Administration officials refused to act effectively to counter the dangers posed by al Qaeda."
--John McCain, August 7, 2008

"You could say, 'Look, is this guy, Laden, really the bad guy that's depicted?' Most of us have never heard of him before."
--John McCain, September, 1998, to Mother Jones, following Clinton's strikes on al Qaeda camps

Data mining for terrorists declared "not feasible"

What a surprise. The basic problem is false positives and false negatives, innocent people who are tagged as terrorists and terrorists who are tagged as innocent people. Let's say your city has a population of one million people. If it's 99% accurate, it identifies 1000 people as terrorists, it also identifies 1000 terrorists as innocent people. Do you think it's 99% accurate? I'd say it's probably not.

Still, I doubt this will be the stake through the heart of trying to catch terrorists through data mining.

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/10/data-mining-for.html