NSA+Effeciency

Ethics Aside, Is NSA's Spy Tool Efficient? [] > > Subject: Efficiency of NSA's mass spy tool > Occasion: Reports about NSA's program collecting of vast amounts of data on personal electronic communications. Objection raised by Statisticians that terror-fighting tool is highly inefficient. > Audience: general public, government officials, foreign leaders, UN, Privacy advocates, security advocates, statisticians > Purpose: to acknowledge the efficiency of the NSA's surveillance program from the perspective of both sides > Speaker: Wall Street Journal, Statisticians, The Number Guy > Tone: serious, critical, impartial, objective, didactic. > Decisions: Used direct quotes from statisticians  to substantiate its claims. Took a neutral stance by acknowledging arguments on both sides of the issue.
 * ** “But some statisticians and security experts have raised another objection: As a terror-fighting tool, it is highly inefficient and has some serious downsides.”
 * “Any automated approach to spotting something rare necessarily produces false positives. That means for every correctly identified target, many more alarms that go off will prove to be incorrect. So if there are vastly more innocent people than would-be terrorists whose communications are monitored, even an extremely accurate test would ensnare many non-terrorists.”
 * “A Ph.D. <span class="GINGER_SOFATWARE_correct">candidate in computational ecology wrote on his blog last week that even a very accurate algorithm for identifying terrorist communications could produce about 10,000 false positives for every real "hit," creating a haystack of false leads to chase in order to find every needle. Several media reports repeated the figure, and some experts agreed. "The false positives will kill you in this kind of system," said Bruce Schneier <span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">.