|
|
|
|
|
|
by fcjqbuvjxpxml
6363 days ago
|
|
|
Yes I do know how it works - my company produces the software that does this for your bank, your credit card and a bunch of 3letter agencies (hence the one-shot username).
What we hand over is a big list of names that are 'linked' (for whatever degree of linked they asked for) to the terrorist/criminal/transaction in question. The tenuous definition of'match' required by some of these customers is scary, two arabic surnames beginning with Al are assumed to have a 50% match for one agency, all chinese with the surname 'Ng' are the same person according to another! I'm sure that somewhere in military intelligence somebody understands sifting for real patterns in this. But compared to the number of people who get refused loans, get extra security at airports or listed as 'persons of interest' the next time a child is abducted - all on the basis of a 6th degree of separation. |
|
|
Then this guy needs to revamp the system. It sounds like it is horribly broken.
Having said that, you have to look at the cost-benefit ratio of both false negatives and false positives for any kind of discrimination engine. Life isn't black and white. If Fred Smith has a nuke and is somewhere overseas (and we know he'll use his real name), I'm more than happy to carefully watch all the Fred Smiths overseas that are making any kind of travel or shipping arrangements, civil liberties have nothing to do with it. That is traditional intelligence, as it applies to foreign citizens.
And this is where the conversation breaks down. Criminal law has no allowance for any kind of false positives (it is not tolerable for anybody to go to jail when they are innocent). Intelligence, on the other hand, is always dealing with probabilities -- you never expect to know fully one way or the other.
There's a fundamental incompatibility with both systems such that when they interface the language doesn't work any more. It's not going to work to try to force the concepts of one world on the other. We have to have a reasonable discussion somewhere in the middle.