"Staggeringly high rate of false positives..."

The government's new surveillance capabilities are casting a net so wide that innocent Americans' privacy has been invaded countless times and very few arrests have been made.  In other words, they're netting everyone in a gigantic fishing expedition which is costly in every way and lethal to democracy and liberty.

Slightly more than half of the 20,000 encounters last year were logged by Customs and Border Protection officers, who turned back or handed over to authorities 550 people, most of them foreigners, Customs officials said. FBI and other officials said that they could not provide data on the number of people arrested or denied entry for the other half of the database hits. FBI officials indicated that the number of arrests was small.

The government says the database is a powerful tool for identifying and tracking suspected terrorists and for sharing intelligence, and that its purpose is not necessarily to make arrests. But the new details about the numbers, disclosed in an FBI budget document and in interviews, raise questions about the database's effectiveness and its impact on privacy, critics said. They argued that the number of hits relative to arrests was alarmingly high and indicated that the threshold for including someone on a watch list was too low, potentially violating thousands of Americans' civil liberties when they are stopped.

David Sobel, senior counsel with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy organization, said the numbers "suggest a staggeringly high rate of false positives with respect to the identification of supposed terrorists." He added that "this really confirms the long-standing fear that this list is inaccurate and ultimately ineffective as an anti-terrorism tool."

Comments

[manapp99]

False positives and you risk inconveniencing some people. False negatives and you risk a sucide bomber blowing himself up in a crowed mall. Which would you prefer?

[PW]

I guess it depends on whether you place a greater value on liberty and democracy, or on guaranteed security. I place a much higher value on liberty and democracy. And I'd add to that our democratic system puts law above everything else, and insists that justice must be seen by the people to have been done. No guy with a bomb in a mall can obliterate that.