Data mining for terrorists declared "not feasible"

[thewayne]

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

Comments

[silveradept]

Hardly. This is just the way they say, "Yeah, we can't justify the costs of it on anything on the record. We're still going to data-mine you, but now it's all going to be classified programs."