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I sympathize with the goal of not giving law enforcement more surveillance powers, but I wonder how valid the anecdotal "connecting the dots" stories of law enf
by schoen 6y ago
I sympathize with the goal of not giving law enforcement more surveillance powers, but I wonder how valid the anecdotal "connecting the dots" stories of law enforcement failures are.
For example, it's conceivable that law enforcement or intelligence agencies regularly get a huge volume of urgent tips, 90% of which are totally incorrect or useless, and that they nonetheless manage to stop 95% of super-bad acts like terror attacks. Then the public hears about the 5% that they don't stop, and especially hears about the 0.5%, say, where a probably-unreliable tip was not successfully used to prevent a super-bad act.
In order to argue convincingly that agencies are actually bad at using the powers or information that they already have, we would probably want to know a lot more about base rates (and about thwarted or deterred crimes).
Edit: This comment downthread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25579252 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25579252 just before mine makes a somewhat similar point (although I was emphasizing the idea that we should want more data for this argument, while the other comment emphasizes the idea that there are more fundamental or important grounds on which to oppose expansions of surveillance powers).
- atoav 6y agoThe problem (luckily!) is, that the thing they are trying to detect happens extremely rare. And when you try to detect rare events, even if your methods are 99.9% accurate you will drown in false positives. I once did the maths on facial recognition tech which was meant to recognize terrorists at Berlin main station. With the known number of commuters there and an accuracy of 99.9% (which is extremely optimistic) they would have over 600 false positives per terrorist if I remember correctly. The system they had installed there however wont even reach 80%... Imagine you have an alarm that rings twice every day, and is real and serious only once a year. How likely are you to react in time? I think this is the fundamental problem with the "we need more data and more rights"-strategy of most police and law enforcement. I am convinced what they actually need is more personel with a good education. Edit: what this kind of data is better at recognizing are broad movements in society like demonstrations, protests and such things.
- AndrewBissell 6y ago> Edit: what this kind of data is better at recognizing are broad movements in society like demonstrations, protests and such things. Yes, this is their real purpose. They're not rolling out these wide ranging systems at extraordinary expense when they're at all unsure they will actually solve the problem they're trying to solve.
- AmericanChopper 6y agoIt’s probably a good thing that vague accusations from an upset ex aren’t enough to have all of your property searched by the police.
- rasz 6y agoabout that 95% success rate of law enforcement https://miami.cbslocal.com/2017/11/09/tsa-fails-bomb-weapons-test/ https://miami.cbslocal.com/2017/11/09/tsa-fails-bomb-weapons... 2017: "more than 70 percent of the time, undercover Department of Homeland Security investigators were able to get through TSA checkpoints with mock knives, guns, and explosives. Just two years ago, testing found a 95 percent failure rate."
- nsajko 6y agoMost TSA employees are actually not law enforcement officers, if I understand this page correctly (and if it's correct): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_Security_Administration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_Security_Admini... EDIT: see this: https://www.tsa.gov/blog/2016/07/03/tsa-myth-busters-do-tsa-officers-arrest-passengers https://www.tsa.gov/blog/2016/07/03/tsa-myth-busters-do-tsa-...