4 ms·

While, I agree this COULD all be a sham story for someone who may be a bit of an attention seeker ... I would like to counter your arguments anyways to show tha

While, I agree this COULD all be a sham story for someone who may be a bit of an attention seeker ... I would like to counter your arguments anyways to show that this story is actually perfectly believable. In the article, the 'Task Force' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Terrorism_Task_Force http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Terrorism_Task_Force) probably has a set of "Tasks" that they must accomplish to be ... well ... worth being a department with a budget. And I imagine one of those is following up on "profile-perfect" households or individuals. So what would make this household 'profile-perfect'? Well it is true that there were searches for Pressure cookers and backpacks but that alone won't mean much due to the massive amounts of searches for these products. But BOTH searches were done; and yet still I have to agree that the intersection still does not provide an un-biased view. However, what if we take into consideration the timescale at which these searches (and possible purchases) took place? We know that the searches were made WITHIN the same week. This factor could possibly give us stronger signals for a profile-match. Now what if we couple that with 'international travel'(e.g. how often a passport was used in a system for out-of-country travel)? The profile match would become higher due to the husbands business trips. And I don't know where these people live, but location could also be a factor as well (e.g. the closer you live to a major city the greater your risk potential factor). Now the cross-section for these factors would have such precision that doing a dragnet on this profile-match set would be feasible. And I imagine it would amount to less than 100 households a week (although I think if the story is true that the agent said this just to 'console' the family that this is common practice and there is nothing to worry about). What do you guys think? EDIT: Also not to mention that another factor could be 'Copy-cat-syndrome'(made up the term) e.g. how many things were occurring at this household to make them appear like potential Boston-bomber copycats?

tptacek 13y ago
You're not engaging with my point. Manpower and expense is a problem with this story, yes, but not the main problem; the main problem is that it's a strategy that is practically guaranteed to betray the existence of a whole new domestic Internet surveillance program while at the same time being almost mathematically guaranteed never to find a single terrorist.
- StandardFuture 13y ago
  Actually I addressed both the Financial and Mathematical points of your initial comment quite avidly/thoroughly.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    No, you think you have, but because you don't understand the base rate theorem you're just talking past me. It's not enough to filter the population down to 100 households. Nothing you do with a filter changes the base rate of terrorist plots, which is extremely low. Profile 100 households, you get 100 false positives. Profile 50 households, you get 50 false positives. The likelihood of any one house you investigate housing an actual plot is always going to be very, very low.
    - StandardFuture 13y ago
      I don't think I could facepalm any harder. What you are basically stipulating is that because pursuing certain leads could be almost always wrong that this would prevent a government department from following up on them? Are you kidding me? >Nothing you do with a filter changes the base rate of terrorist plots, which is extremely low. In that case, I imagine the base rate of 'post-successful terrorist act plotting' is higher than 'pre-successful terrorist act plotting,' which would eliminate your argument. Also, what you would be studying is the TYPE of terrorist activity not total plot numbers e.g. the stages of activity. If a successful terrorist attack was pulled off not to long ago in the past then that would call for an increase in the base rate of the TYPE of plotting. More terrorists would be more invigorated to pursue/look into similar methods as their next plot. Maybe the cross-section of the plotting-type-pivot is what you could match against? The simplest way to express my facepalm is: you are tremendously oversimplifying things.
      - notahacker 13y ago
        Surely any increase in wannabe-copycat terrorists Googling for items used in recent terrorist attacks would be more than cancelled out by a much larger proportional increase in the much larger group of people that follow the news and don't want to be terrorists also Googling for items used in recent attacks
jen_h 13y ago
Agree on plausibility. Also, don't forget the 20-year-old son. Bet they checked the medicine cabinet.
deleted 13y ago
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tptacek 13y ago

You're not engaging with my point. Manpower and expense is a problem with this story, yes, but not the main problem; the main problem is that it's a strategy that is practically guaranteed to betray the existence of a whole new domestic Internet surveillance program while at the same time being almost mathematically guaranteed never to find a single terrorist.

StandardFuture 13y ago
Actually I addressed both the Financial and Mathematical points of your initial comment quite avidly/thoroughly.
- tptacek 13y ago
  No, you think you have, but because you don't understand the base rate theorem you're just talking past me. It's not enough to filter the population down to 100 households. Nothing you do with a filter changes the base rate of terrorist plots, which is extremely low. Profile 100 households, you get 100 false positives. Profile 50 households, you get 50 false positives. The likelihood of any one house you investigate housing an actual plot is always going to be very, very low.
  - StandardFuture 13y ago
    I don't think I could facepalm any harder. What you are basically stipulating is that because pursuing certain leads could be almost always wrong that this would prevent a government department from following up on them? Are you kidding me? >Nothing you do with a filter changes the base rate of terrorist plots, which is extremely low. In that case, I imagine the base rate of 'post-successful terrorist act plotting' is higher than 'pre-successful terrorist act plotting,' which would eliminate your argument. Also, what you would be studying is the TYPE of terrorist activity not total plot numbers e.g. the stages of activity. If a successful terrorist attack was pulled off not to long ago in the past then that would call for an increase in the base rate of the TYPE of plotting. More terrorists would be more invigorated to pursue/look into similar methods as their next plot. Maybe the cross-section of the plotting-type-pivot is what you could match against? The simplest way to express my facepalm is: you are tremendously oversimplifying things.
    - notahacker 13y ago
      Surely any increase in wannabe-copycat terrorists Googling for items used in recent terrorist attacks would be more than cancelled out by a much larger proportional increase in the much larger group of people that follow the news and don't want to be terrorists also Googling for items used in recent attacks

jen_h 13y ago

Agree on plausibility. Also, don't forget the 20-year-old son. Bet they checked the medicine cabinet.

deleted 13y ago

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