Decision theory and the Underpants bomber | Hacker News Reader

Decision theory and the Underpants bomber

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10 pointswallflower4 comments

The more information authorities have to deal with the bigger the chance they'll miss the needles. After all, there is a relatively constant number of needles, make a bigger haystack and you've only made it harder to find the needles.

What they need is better information, not more of it.

Tightening the screws on things like no-fly lists is only useful if the underlying information gets much better than it is today, right now the number of false positives is so high that you're essentially looking at the boy that cried wolf once too many.

Maybe this guy did trip a flag, maybe he didn't (he should have, but that's after the fact). The problem is that on the day that he flew probably 10's if not 100's of people were actually flagged and searched as false positives, and that's one of the many reasons why this false negative managed to slip through the maze.

Another thing that this clearly demonstrates is a total communications failure between agencies, and that's not exactly news. As always, the information was there for the taking but because of the high number of links between the people that act and the people that know nothing was done with the information.

edit: And because of political correctness a lot of time is wasted on searching people that are picked at random when openly profiling would probably be much more effective but will be shouted down immediately, so the system actually has to waste a lot of time and effort just to avoid being accused of racism.

As someone else pointed out (paraphrased) the day that old white rich people start blowing up airliners we have a real problem.

Also, every day there are probably worried parents that call in that their son is about to become a radical, and 99% of the time you probably never hear from those people again.

An interesting thing I noticed is that plenty of these terrorists seem to be rejecting their parents wealth and become willing victims for radicalization, I wonder if there isn't a deeper psychological parallel that might be used to identify this 'kind' of wannabe mass murderer, after all if the terrorist groups can uncover these characters with some regularity others should be able to do the same, then either get to them first and give them some psychological anti-dote or use it to figure out the risk at a later date.

I don't think they need better information, just a collection place that adds up the red flags and spits out a security risk level. Cross referencing the different sources of information should do it. Create a central database. It also may be how these people are tracked. If it's on a assigned case basis, that could be difficult to manage.

great article. the final point is crucial: there needs to be a separate level, between normal and no-fly, that is relatively easy to trigger, for special screening. the "fire hose" of intelligence needs to be connected to that, and it's an almost-real-time problem (eg. paying with cash just before the flight).

I believe that kind of list already exists. A friend of mine is consistently given extra screening every time he passes through an airport. They put a mark on his boarding pass and he gets a pat-down.

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