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."
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.
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:4, Interesting)
Using the US Government's attitude to pre-9/11 is not very fair. They ignored the evidence because they figured that perhaps there would be some hijacking or some fairly minor bombing. They were caught by surprise because they were complacent, but that doesn't mean that they lacked the information to know exactly who was responsible.
I'm not at all surprised they had the information that fact. There were likely people in the CIA and FBI trying to get someone to listen in the upper management levels for years. Now those executives wanted answers and they finally listened.
The only thing that happened with 9/11 is that the government got an attitude adjustment. George W. Bush wanted to completely ignore the Middle East, back in the day. Then the Middle East came to him.
Why is it that people want to see intricate plots in something that can easily be explained by heading down to the DMV and checking out the average initiative level of a standard government worker? There are no "plots", there is no "campaign of fear". There is only crass incompetence. Don't kid yourself. 9/11 was a tragedy of bureaucracy and political tunnel vision. Believing in some sort of fiendish plot is giving them far too much credit.
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Generally spot on, but I have to point out that the standard government worker is no more useless than the standard corporate worker. Corporations are routinely damaged or destroyed because some executive won't listen to the lower level guy who happens to be immersed daily in the reality of the business situation, telling him that his brilliant idea for a new formula for Coke isn't going to work.
After all, those people in the CIA and FBI trying to get someone to listen in the upper management levels were al
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.
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*needle.
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Vaguely related to my previous post above, having all the data in the world can actually impede your ability to find what you are looking for. Consider the frequent TV lawyer show of responding to the other side's request for disclosure by handing them a truckload of documents related to the case, since they're not going to be able to find the one smoking gun document they are looking for.
That's what happened in 9/11 in part; the government had tons of data, but without having a focus on al qaeda, bin lad
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There is one key difference in medical testing and NSA surveillance that no one seems to be talking about.
When I go to the doctor, it is politically and morally correct if the doctor looks at my race, age, gender, etc. and decides what is high risk to me and then narrow down the tests specifically for me. In short "discriminate" based on my age, sex, race, etc.
When a security enforcement person in a broad sense (NSA, cops, everyone combined), looks at you, they are not allowed to discriminate based on your
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Yeah the medical issue is a problem with matching test results to actions taken. The argument that we should do less tests, because the tests might find something and then we must take action always seemed a little specious to me. Sure, you might end up doing extra procedures based on the results of the test, but that just means that we need to do one of:
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.
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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.
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But the solution to "acting on the data is burdensome" isn't to collect less data. It's to be smarter about how you act on it.
In the case of a screening test, sure, you want to set the frequency of tests to the optimal one for "health problems successfully detected and mitigated" vs. "health risk increase from the test itself".
"mamograms increase cancer risk" is a valid argument for controlling the number of mammogram tests. "Mamogram test results must be acted upon" is not, because you have the choice at
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Sometimes we have no way of knowing that the test was a false positive, that's the definition of a false positive. Not only that, measuring less often doesn't mean that you won't catch the cancer, it means you'll catch it later. If the negative effects from the number of acted-upon false positives outweighs the benefits of the true-positives being found earlier, it means it is better to measure less frequently. Like GP, you're making the assumption that there is no such thing as a false positive, and/or tha
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While you can't know if any given result is a false positive on its own, you can eventually determine the false positive rate using the results of follow up (or non-follow up outcomes), and use that to inform the decision about whether to take additional steps.
Further, I somewhat doubt that it's a simple yes/no on the false positives. Surely things like imaging tests will have varying degrees of confidence in the results depending on how well resolved the detected structures are, or even the shape or locat
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One size doesn't fit all. That's why I cheerfully began annual mammograms when I was 33 - because I am in a high risk group, and for me there is a clear benefit.
And for others, there isn't, and generally speaking what has been considered to be a clear benefit from these tests is being reconsidered as the cost of having the test run becomes better known. Breast cancer is, in fact, one of the more involved and contentious ones (as well as the one that impacts me the most directly.) The cost benefit analysis (
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Violent extremism is a ideological disease that spreads in the same way as a infection through society.
[citation needed] Violent extremism is not a "virus" at all. It's a product of poverty and lack of education, making the masses exploitable by unscrupulous individuals who seek quick wealth and power. Educate your people and extremism disappears. Do you think it's because of the TSA and the DHS that the US suffers relatively little "terrorism" (both before and after 9/11)?
As for specificity and sensiti
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Mohamed Atta the ring leader of the September 11th attacks was not uneducated, he had a degree in architecture and was pursuing a graduate degree. He came from a wealthy family. It is dangerous when you make the claim that violent extremism is a product of poverty and lack of education. While they may be correlated, correlation is not causation and the statement leads people to believe that we can eliminate violent extremism simply by eliminating poverty and providing education.
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Really? Most people, when presented with extremism (even non-violent) tend to back away slowly and treat said extremist as a nutjob.
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The point being, that if the only test you have produces more false positives than true positives by orders of magnitude, it's worthless for actually finding the true positives anyway, so if there's going to be an epidemic, your lousy test isn't going to help at all.
Gedanken experiment, Reductio ad absurdum, etc.: Consider the ultimate in such tests: Just flag everybody who gets the test as a positive result. You will absolutely be guaranteed to catch every single true positive case, and you will be absol
well duh. (Score:5, Interesting)
the NSA is not concerned about infringing on people's rights and civil liberties. if we are going with medical analogies, i think the NSA would rather amputate than treat an infection.
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"The NSA" would not "rather" do anything, because "the NSA" doesn't make up missions for itself; it only responds to Information Needs (INs) levied upon it. "The NSA" is only interested responding to the INs as aggressively as possible under the law. If it's not doing everything possible under the law, I'm not sure what it should be doing.
Of course, this analogy is all wrong, too, because everyone assumes that NSA is "mining" the phone call metadata, when in reality it is only collecting it so that it may b
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"The NSA" would not "rather" do anything, because "the NSA" doesn't make up missions for itself; it only responds to Information Needs (INs) levied upon it.
Really? So everything the NSA does is decided explicitly by politicians. I find that hard to believe. Care to provide any citation backing up this claim?
"The NSA" is only interested responding to the INs as aggressively as possible under the law.
However, this claim is false because we now know that the NSA violated the US constitution.
If it's not doing everything possible under the law, I'm not sure what it should be doing.
Gathering a reasonable amount of intelligence under adequate judicial oversight? A reasonable cost/benefit tradeoff like everywhere else and without violating the constitition? Just some crazy ideas, I know, I know...
Of course, this analogy is all wrong, too, because everyone assumes that NSA is "mining" the phone call metadata, when in reality it is only collecting it so that it may be queried for specific targets later. (I realize people believe it is all being mined with no proof of this and in contravention of everything in the leaks and numerous on- and off-the-record statements from current and former officials and other experts. I also realize people think all internet traffic is being collected and mined, even though there is no proof of this, either, and a program that was collecting internet metadata for later searching was terminated in 2011.
These claims are mostly false. However, independen
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No time to read TFA (Score:5, Funny)
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I'm not sure I like that bald-faced attack on dwarves. It ends up siding against dwarves while equating the NSA with the Uruk-hai, and I don't think that's fair to the Uruk-hai.
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On behalf of the Holy Alliance Against Little People With Facial Hair, I must protest.
It seems likely (Score:5, Insightful)
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A small price to pay.
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.
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Of course. Pat Buchanan talked about this recently at NetHui [nethui.org.nz] in New Zealand:
Terrorism is a fig leaf placed on the intelligence business to justify what they do. Terrorism is not the bulk of what intelligence agencies do. The bulk of what they do (to include the GCSB) is traditional state-to-state espionage, Increasingly cyber in manifestation. But 90% of what intelligence agencies do, in this country and elsewhere, is spy on other states (perhaps spy on commercial entities connected to a state). But terrorism is the buzzword that western intelligence agencies use to justify all sorts of sins.
Video link here [youtube.com], which also explains how the GCSB gets around not being able to spy on NZ citizens via contracting their staff out to other agencies. Also, 80-90% of intelligence is gathered from freely available sources (e.g. facebook, twitter), so terrorism is a 10% of 10% sort of thing in terms of surveillance laws.
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Indeed. In much the same sense as the warrantless wiretaps got the nod because they would primarily be used on terrorists, and have since been found to be used almost exclusively on non-terrorist related crimes, there is a fair chance that the NSA is not watching only foreigners engaged in acts of sabotage, but is 'helping out' other agencies as well with their daily chores. That's on a broad basis -> on an individual basis, there are, no doubt, petty individual requests / favors being carried out, much
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.
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: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."
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No-fly lists aren't a test. It's more like a vaccine which we don't know what the positive effects of. The negatives are well publicized though.
Re:Flawed Analogy (Score:5, Informative)
When you screen huge masses of people needlessly, almost all to all of your hits are going to be incorrect.
Yes, this is something that apparently even most doctors don't understand. Suppose who had a simple problem like this:
1% of women at age forty who participate in routine screening have breast cancer. 80% of women with breast cancer will get positive mammographies. 9.6% of women without breast cancer will also get positive mammographies. A woman in this age group had a positive mammography in a routine screening. What is the probability that she actually has breast cancer?
The correct answer (calculated from Bayes' Theorem, or simple logic) is 7.8%. Most doctors cannot do this problem, and that not only get the answer wrong, but they often get it wildly off -- estimating the answer to be much greater than 50% (often 70% or so, probably from simply subtracting the two numbers).
If you don't believe me, have a look at this link [yudkowsky.net]. As the author says there:
usually, only around 15% of doctors get it right. ("Really? 15%? Is that a real number, or an urban legend based on an Internet poll?" It's a real number. See Casscells, Schoenberger, and Grayboys 1978; Eddy 1982; Gigerenzer and Hoffrage 1995; and many other studies. It's a surprising result which is easy to replicate, so it's been extensively replicated.)
The author here is being generous. I looked at these studies years ago, and many of them show only 5-10% getting the answer to such problems correct.
And if this is true of physicians, it's probably true of just about anyone else who encounters a lot of false positives and isn't used to thinking statistically. That means most people are very likely to draw incorrect conclusions about the prevalence of something when the false-positive rate is high... making those using the methodology assume that (1) their methodology is better than it is, and (2) that with more "assumed positives" from incorrect logic, the incidence of whatever they're looking for in the population is higher than it is.
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human genome project
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viagra
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999 terrorists will be caught by the test. 1 will go free.
3000 innocent people will be caught as terrorists.
That's part of why
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Unfortunately, in the case of the NSA, that's exactly what happens. If you show positive on one of the screening tests for terrorism, boom! you're on the no-fly list. It's like immediately giving full chemo and whole body radiation if the nurse thinks a mole looks a bit suspicious.
Even with properly used screening tests, if the followup test is expensive or invasive, it's often better to just skip it if you have no particular reason to suspect you have a given condition.
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If a positive result is obtained additional data is gathered using different tests aimed at eliminating the false positives.
If the additional test is too expensive, then at least for the case of illnesses you wait for the first indicator to be something else like "doc, I'm not feeling ok". By now if the test comes positive you have two indicators of a possible illness which now makes the expensive test worthwhile.
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Either way you are gathering more data, not less.
The analogy this article is based on is not valid.
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You gather less data as compared to the test everyone option.
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We do have some historical pointers. The CIA, MI6, NGO, faith based support for protest movements sent into "sealed" 1980's Eastern Europe.
Printing equipment (small and large scale), tv/radio broadcast efforts, books, Bibles, capturing images of life under house arrest.
Every container, bag, box, person, car, van, truck would have to be searched entering - no fun if you want hard curre
Re: Flawed Analogy (Score:2)
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good for the Affordable Care Act (ACA) as without (Score:3)
The databases become a nice preexisting conditions and Recissions list.
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.
Snowden For President 2016 (Score:1)
You're also missing a much bigger problem with his choice. When you collect data on a disease, the disease doesn't take steps to avoid being in the data. It's not a sentient being like terrorists. The terrorists aren't in the dataset he's collecting, because he's collecting the low hanging fruit in the easy to process data formats.
General Alexander decided simply to store it all, and so that is what happened. Terrorism is just the excuse. IT WAS NEVER HIS CHOICE TO MAKE. He was never given the power to flip
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Hehehe, nice sentiment. Unfortunately, the opposite could happen, namely a president could be elected that thinks all this surveillance is a good idea and to start using it against dissenters and "undesirables" in the population. And political opponents as well. The date collected is ideally suited to these purposes. If that happens, the US will make Nazi Germany look tame.
Ultimately, the same motivation (Score:4, Interesting)
Whether excessive medical tests or excessive surveillance, the minions happily promote it to ensure their job security. If the patient or the society suffers, well, that's okay. Perhaps a bit regrettable, but okay.
Ultimately, a society that strenuously promotes competition also engenders a mercenary attitude. So, you see, the excesses of Wall Street are not that far removed from the excesses of the NSA, or Microsoft, to pick but a very few examples.
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..., no one is labeled as having a condition until a confirmatory test with higher specificity is positive. I can't speak to how terrorists are labeled, but please don't drag medicine down into that morass.
Here in the US, we're still suffering from a case of just such labeling around 20 years ago. That was when we started seeing widespread suggestions that people should avoid being tested for AIDS. The explanations was that the first two widespread tests had false positive rates of about 10% and 5%. The actual incidence at the time was somewhere around 1 per million. So, it was explained, if the entire US population were given the first test, it would catch around 300 people with AIDS, and would also fi
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Indeed. The only rational explanation is that the NSA surveillance is not about fighting terrorism, but about identifying dissenters, independent thinkers, etc. These people are undesirable in a police state and that seems to be what all this is aimed at.
Here's the same argument about drug testing (Score:4, Informative)
Here's another doctor who made the same argument about testing for illegal drugs. Be sure to catch the distinction between screening tests and diagnostic tests.
http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2013/07/drug-testing-considered-screening-tests.html [kevinmd.com]
Should drug testing be considered screening tests?
Chris Rangel, MD | Conditions | July 12, 2013
However, the possibility of a false positive drug screen and the need for further testing and evaluation is rarely considered outside the context of clinical practice. Employers, school administrators, government agencies, and law enforcement can and do consider a positive drug test to be perfectly equivalent to an admission of illicit drug use. This frequently results in the administration of some form of punishment or corrective action being delivered without giving the accused the right to defend themselves in any way. Essentially, drug testing is an effective way to violate a person’s right to due process since most drug screening is managed by lay people in non-clinical roles who believe that drug testing is 100% reliable. But this would be the same absurdity as giving chemotherapy to the smoker with the abnormal chest x-ray without first trying to verify the diagnosis with further evaluation (due process).
The other problem comes from the mass drug testing of large numbers of people (either random or at the initial point of contact). The interpretation of the results of a medical test are never as simple as positive or negative. The statistical probability of a false positive or a false negative result must be considered in concert with the pretest probability....
Annual physical exams are problematical too (Score:2)
Both for false positives and ineffective treatments: http://www.drmcdougall.com/misc/2005nl/july/050700physical.htm [drmcdougall.com]
" The annual physical exam is an intensive, well-orchestrated, experience designed to make apparently well people, sick (with good intentions). You walk into the doctor's office as George or Francine and you leave as a breast cancer, prostate cancer or heart-disease victim. The initial exams commonly lead to more tests â" some of which are painful, disfiguring, and dangerous, such as mam
Another great video on this by Dr. McDougall (Score:2)
"Avoid Doctors to Protect Your Health!" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahELa5oYrkM [youtube.com]
To be clear, at the link in my previous post there are a few specific tests McDougall suggests for early cancer detection (including visual exams of the skin for melanoma).
Wrong analogy. (Score:2)
Bad on purpose (Score:2)
The NSA is full of really smart people. There is not much we can come up with here they haven't thought of. The problem is that they are not being evaluated by how many attacks they stop (see the Boston bombings). They get measured by how active and busy they look.
Political ignoramuses consider a short, narrow targeted no-fly list a failure (picture Bush Jr in the oval office: "you've only found 100 people after I gave you 10Gigadollars???") while they are very impressed with a 100K long no-fly list ("you a
Is far worse than that (Score:2)
When you weaponize computers everything could look as a disease. Running a trojan (or worse, removing a software that is a government trojan), receiving spam message, doing a "funny comment", or just someone else playing social engineering could put you in the enemy of the state list. The fake version of the disease is the one viral, not the disease per se (even if the government is trying very hard to have sick people to justify what they are doing)
In medical terms, what is being perpetrated is creating a
The NSA does not care anout terrorists (Score:3)
Unless they are terminally stupid, they do not. Surveillance does not actually help against terrorism, and the NSA does know that very well. Terrorism is just a convenient pretext (i.e. lie) to justify the surveillance. What they are really interested in is profiling every person they can get data on and identify dissenters, independent thinkers, etc. as these can threaten a police state, as the US is more and more becoming.
What they are overlooking is that this is extremely dangerous. Just have one president go off the deep end, and the US will make Nazi Germany look tame. All the surveillance and population control mechanisms are already in place. The police is already used to shoot citizens as a matter of routine. Prisons are in ample supply. The only thing missing is the madman at the top. It will be just a question of time before that one is found.
Liability determines the motivations (Score:2)
When doctors say it's bad to collect too much information, they're talking about medicine not liability. Liability determines the motivations, and tells us how both doctors and the NSA will act:
If Doctors or the NSA don't identify someone: Major liability (although doctors only have to ID patients they encounter, not everyone in the general population)
If Doctors or the NSA have false positives: No liability (because it was an honest mistake, by people doing their best)
If Doctors or the NSA don't treat/inves
From a Criminal's Perspective (Score:2)
Reliable tests (Score:2)
Bayes Theorem (Score:2)
I had the good fortune to run across Bayes Theorem (Not by name) in an article about misdiagnosing problems in Discover magazine back in the 80's, and for some reason filed the factoid away as 'Oh, this is *important* and is going to apply to a lot of things' and have never forgotten it.
The fundamental takeaway for me is "It doesn't *matter* how accurate your test is - what matters is how accurate it is compared to how rare the condition you're looking for is.". Random drug tests, random highway stops, the
The crazy is strong in this one (Score:3, Informative)
You, sir, are a nutjob.
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Not so fast. There is precedence. The Gulf of Tonkin Incident for one.
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Does that matter, in re. the parent post?
Start with the assumption that terrorism is NOT just a bunch of false-flag state operations from some group such as the CIA.
If generating these huge lists creates a cloud of false positives that will make us actually less safe, then we (we meaning citizens of the country making the lists) want the state not to waste that money. We ought to oppose wasteful, counterproductive ways of fighting terrorism.
No
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Does that matter, in re. the parent post?
It demonstrates that there are black swans. Having established that black swans exist, you must now observe your swan to determine if it is, in fact, white.
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The fact that the NSA is not really trying find terrorists does not mean that other terrorists do not exist.
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Re:Slashdot Propaganda Machine Working Overtime (Score:5, Interesting)
Where's the "-1: conspiracy theorist" option?
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Yes, specially with the revealings of the recent weeks, it is impossible to think about any other wrong doing of governments and spying agencies (i.e. conspiracies).
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Maybe it should be "+1 conspiracy theorist"
I've had my fun at the expense of foil hatters in my day, but recently I kinda wonder.
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Re:hmm...doctors just don't worfk as hard (Score:5, Informative)
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If only I had mod points to give... thanks.
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And this in itself will create more "terrorist" because some of the people who end up on a no-fly list, lose their job and credit, wife and kids probably too; will be pretty mad and decide to do crazy things. Then more surveillance is needed and more control. The more control the more people will become "terrorists" true or not and repeat until either the terrorists on one side win or the other terrorists.
Haven't people seen enough science fiction movies by now to realize everyone is a terrorist if you push