Honest question, what would happen to the other three quarters?
Honest question, what would happen to the other three quarters?
All because people can't understand the example in question, which appears in the first few chapters of most introduction to statistics books. And while all that money is being spent on useless checks the 9/11 terrorists, who the agencies were warned about, and the Boston bombers, who the agencies were ALSO warned about, are not followed up on because human and other resources are being spent on mass surveillance.
What Schneier is missing is that while you can't ID people that well from a single test, you can apply a bunch of them. In his example, one test improves the probability of correctly ID a sociopath from 4% to 24%. Apply another, different test of similar efficacy to that result set and you'll have a population of 21 true positives, and 8 or 9 false positives, increasing the probabiliy of a successful ID from 25% to ~70%. Sure, there's no single test that will give you reliable answers, but so what? It's OK to use a multi-pronged solution.
"Facebook records reveal convicted killer wrote 13-word post 5 years ago - red flag was raised - why was nothing done?"
Waiting until someone actually commits a crime will stop people being persecuted for a coincidental similarity of their behavior to that of a terrorist, sociopath or mime artist.