What Medical Tests Should Teach Us About the NSA Surveillance Program 107
First time accepted submitter Davak writes "In many ways finding the small amount of terrorists within the United States is like screening a population of people for a rare disease. A physician explains why collecting excessive data is actually dangerous. Each time a test is run, the number of people incorrectly identified quickly dwarfs the correct matches. Just like in medicine, being incorrectly labelled has serious consequences."
It seems likely (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Then what do you do then? (Score:5, Insightful)
So you have no test and just let the virus spread?
You extend the analogy too far. In fact, the analogy in TFA, while interesting, has limited relevance. Yes, the danger and destructive effects of false positives are important in both medicine and national security, but where TFA mentions (almost in passing) that "The balance between privacy and security is always difficult", it sidesteps the simple fact that this surveillance is about neither. It is about control.
Let us not fool ourselves that the US (or any other) government is actually likely to prevent all (or any) acts of terrorism with these efforts. We have recent proof otherwise. Our various governments have simply seized on this supposed threat as a means to exert control - for no other reason than because they can.
Flawed Analogy (Score:4, Insightful)
Correctly done, Medical testing is made more accurate by gathering additional data.
Basic tests are generally inexpensive but have a pretty high false positive rate. The key here is to have a very low false negative rate first and then minimize the false positive rate with additional tests.
If a positive result is obtained additional data is gathered using different tests aimed at eliminating the false positives. This additional testing is often more invasive and expensive, however it drastically reduces the number of false positives.
The premise this article is based on is just repeating the initial screening over and over. That's not what happens.
Let's not be rational about this ... (Score:5, Insightful)
As your elected representative let me enlighten you as to why you voted for me rather than the other guy:
* I made good, powerful speaches. I went to some classes to help with this, it is more important that I dress in a good suit and have a strong voice than what I say makes sense.
* I avoided checking facts when making opinions. If you know the facts you realise that things are not black & white, but to express that makes people think that you are a ditherer, that you don't know what you stand for. Who wants a politician who, when asked a question instead of saying ''yes'' or ''no'' says something long and boring that starts with ''It depends'' ?
* Most of you don't look at the facts, you work on gut feeling and gross extrapolation. You remember that story in the local press last week about the thief from out of town who had green eyes, blond hair and a limp ? Yes: you are quite right to know that everyone from out of town with blond hair & a limp is a good for nothing crook and we don't want people like that round here!
* You people just want to be safe. You don't care what happens to out of townies, how hard we make it for them; or even foreigners -- some of who have a skin of a funny colour. They just don't matter!
* You don't really know what safe means, but are happy if you can still watch TV and drink beer when supporting your team. My predecessor did not do anything to make you realise that you can do something else, neither will I --so you will vote for me next time.
* In order to get on the short list for election I had to sign up to what the party says. They won't listen to a newbie like me, if I ask questions there are plenty of others to choose from who do what the party bosses say.
* Do you know how much I got in ''research grants'' and travel ''expences'' from the large corpotations? To say nothing about my fee for 2 days work a year as a consultant. I must not upset them by saying something that upsets them. All that money buys a lot of publicity as well as letting me buy that new yacht..
* I have a good friend who knows people, (I don't want to know why they are), but I got warnings of the other guy's plans and it was mighty useful when his campaign manager was caught in bed with that young ... that no one had seen before
So you see, I would be really silly if I upset the status quo and made you think for yourself.
Re:Flawed Analogy (Score:5, Insightful)
When you screen huge masses of people needlessly, almost all to all of your hits are going to be incorrect. Additional testing of these false positives are harmful. Biopsies, radiation, no-fly lists -- harmful.
Nobody is saying that we should never wiretap if we have evidence. That's testing a small population. The problem here is that we are wiretapping everybody to attempt to find evidence.
Re:It seems likely (Score:4, Insightful)
If the intention was to help the American people
The goal is to benefit the bank accounts of a small set of the American people.
Sociopaths will flatter themselves that they got it close enough.
Re:Then what do you do then? (Score:5, Insightful)
Let us not fool ourselves that the US (or any other) government is actually likely to prevent all (or any) acts of terrorism with these efforts. We have recent proof otherwise.
It's no longer "recent" by media standards, but the (second ;-) attack on the World Trade Center is an excellent example. Much of the news coverage of the event is still available online, and if you dig it up and look at it, you'll see that several things stand out. One is that the US authorities were totally taken by surprise, and didn't have any idea what was happening until after the second tower was hit. However, it became clear in the first several hours that they'd decided who to blame. The reports from everywhere were full of "Al Qaeda" and "Osama bin Laden" (often badly mispronounced ;-), despite the obvious fact that they couldn't have collected the evidence in such a short time.
Over the following weeks and months, it also became clear that their ignorance was pretty much self-imposed. They had been warned about the specific perps by various other countries' security folks, and chose to ignore the information. This was in part due to a serious shortage of Arabic-speaking translators in the US military/security agencies. This was in turn due to their mistreatment of Arabic speakers, which the US has millions of. If you look into this, you'd probably also conclude that anyone fluent in Arabic would have to be really stupid (or suicidal) to volunteer for a translator job in those agencies.
The most parsimonious theory explaining this is that the US government isn't particularly interested in finding and blocking terrorists; they are mostly interested in using such things as a way of instilling fear in the general population. With this understanding, the government's "anti-terrorist" activities make a lot of sense.
(And, of course, treating the US government as some sort of unified, monolithic entity is a major mistake. There are lots of people in various government agencies who understand the situation pretty well. But they're generally not the ones in charge. Or if they are, they also understand that it's all to their own personal benefit. Or they keep quiet because they understand how "whistle blowers" are treated, and don't want that to happen to them. But we may hear from them after they retire. ;-)
Re:Then what do you do then? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not the precise argument, at least in a medical context. If the tests themselves and the responses to false positive have no significant medical downside, that's one thing.
But, let's say we starting giving all women yearly mammograms at age 16. Now, while this might reveal a very tiny number of additional breast abnormalities (many of which won't be cancerous) it's going to expose a lot of women to increased amounts of radiation, and while that amount of radiation is slight, that is likely to lead to a measurable increase in rates of cancer. If you're causing more cancer than you're catching, it's a stupid test, right?*
In addition, the response to false positives needs to be taken into question. Further procedures have their own medical costs. If you have a high rate of false positives leading to painful and hazardous procedures, that cost, too, has to be weighed against the value of catching those cancers early. ... and I will stop here as the breast cancer analogy in particular is one I can babble on about for a very long time. (My mother is a breast cancer survivor, and was diagnosed fairly young, which puts me in a high risk category.)
* One could make the argument that this is a very tight analogy, as if surveillance is increasing hostility towards the government by US citizens, and towards the country overall abroad, we could be creating a worse situation than we're addressing. I think this is a pretty strong argument applied to some of our foreign wars.
Re:Flawed Analogy (Score:4, Insightful)
Honestly, I think the Feds know that collecting huge amounts of random data makes the job of finding bad people harder, not easier. But the point of the program isn't about finding bad guys, it is mainly to create a repository of information that can be accessed whenever they want to silence critics.
They don't care if they send you to prison because of your activism itself, they just want you in prison. This data collection coupled with a Federal code base so vast and vague as to be unknowable, basically ensures that everyone is a criminal and makes it trivial to suppress dissent simply by rummaging through the data store, finding some random bit of nonsense, and charging that person with 50 years worth of bullshit. Or as Snowden would say, it's "turnkey tyranny."
Re:Then what do you do then? (Score:4, Insightful)
You're ignoring the side effects from treatment of people who didn't have the condition, and the suffering they go through. In the breast cancer analogy, chemotherapy is terrible: it causes your hair to fall out, you lose months or years of life to something that wasn't necessary. The alternatives are radiation therapy and mastectomy, which are worse. So how many people wrongly getting their breasts removed, or getting chemo, is worth saving a single person's life?
This is true in military and intelligence situations as well. If law enforcement starts having negative side effects (think TSA nude scanners and groping, SWAT teams being called as pranks etc) then the negative effects on society are worse than the actual problems they would be preventing. Not only that, but if they aren't seen as helping, people will become less cooperative to law enforcement officials, which will further break down social peace.
Sharpshooter Falacy (Score:4, Insightful)
You know, when people talk about who was warned about what, they completely forget the sharpshooter falacy. Warn everyone about everyone, then when some one does some one thing you can say "you were warned" because, in the huge pile of everything-squared you can find that nedle in the nedle-stack.
Now all the people who pointed at the nedle demand a bigger nedle-stack full of smaller and smaller nedles.
More signal. But more noise. And more noise per each increment in signal.
And more blame to go around.
There was a song, it has a point. "You have to hold-on loosly but don't let go". There was a movie, and it has a point "the more you tighten your grip the more systems will slip through your fingers." It's like there are all these old aphorisms and they came about for having truth within them. The truth of moderation.
More isn't better, it likely never was.