Hacker News Reader

> For the privacy advocates when it comes to public transportation like flying: what do you fear may happen as a result of greater background checks?

False positives, increased harassment/inconveniece of innocent people, chilling effects, driving people away from airlines towards other, less efficient means of long distance travel, even as airlines are struggling to stay in business. TSA becoming more powerful, free citizens becoming desensitized to privacy invasions, increased rape-scans, crotch fondling, etc.

Generally, it makes our country a worse place to travel to/from/within. And what are the benefits, again? Because I'm not seeing any, and that is the question you should be asking, not simply "what's the harm?".

I would argue that there are MORE false positives when you don't have enough information. After all, mathematically speaking let's say you sample X things versus X + Y things. Assuming there to be a similar probability distribution for the decision making (same first moments at least), a greater sample size would lead to greater accuracy and therefore less false positives, as well as less false negatives.

You should consider applying Bayes' rule here. For reference, there are 800 million airline passengers in the US every year. Good luck.

?

Ex. You have a test that detects cancer with 99% certainty, and a prevalence of cancer of 1 in 1 million people. In a sample size of 100 million people:

    People with cancer correctly identified: 99%*100=99 people

    People with cancer not identified: 1%*100=1 person

    People without cancer falsely identified= 1%*99,999,900 = 999,999 people

    People without cancer correctly identified:99%*99,999,900=98,999,901 people

Even with 99% accuracy you have nearly a million people falsely identified, but only identify 99 people with cancer. Now extend this to terrorism, 800 million riders for 12 years, and a prevalence of 2? possible terrorists (shoe, underwear) in the last 12 years. Also keep in mind that since both of these guys made it on the plane, the accuracy of the the terrorist screening process may not be too high.

I downvoted you. Frankly, I would have upvoted you if not for your ridiculous meta comment about HN, including: "I predict this comment will be heavily voted down just because people disagree with me [...]".

I suspect that your comments about what HN is or isn't likely to do in response to your comment is why you're being downvoted, not because of your rational (if wrongheaded) discussion.

I rarely engage in meta debates, and it's possible you're just trolling, but I just wanted you to know.

Politically tinged comments seem to get downvoted quite a bit here, similarly to Slashdot and many other forums. I've experienced this myself. In my opinion, downvoting a comment for any reason other than flagrant trolling, personal attacks, or similar content that degrades the dialogue should be considered inappropriate use of the privilege, because it undermines the feature and renders it pointless. On a Slashdot political topic, I have to read at -1 to catch all the points of view.

To be clear, my downvote was very much in the spirit of two of HN's guidelines:

Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downmod you.

See: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I didn't downvote your comment, but you're pretty clearly flouting the first guideline. If you want to be a productive part of a community, please respect the guidelines of that community. I have no problem with contrarian political remarks, as long as they're presented rationally and refrain from breaking the community's guidelines.

I appreciate that feedback, but I actually added that "prediction" after the value on the comment reached -2. So I am pretty sure it was because people disagreed with my stance, as I had provided a bunch of thoughtful reasoning besides simply stating my opinion and the comment was inviting reasonable discussion.

So I decided to call out this phenomenon and make this a genuine test of whether I would be downvoted simply because people disagreed with my position, WITHOUT discussing it first. But sadly it was contaminated by people like you downvoting because I had violated a guideline. I guess in retrospect it wasn't that productive to do it.

Two things:

1. If you really wanted to make it a test of downvoting, you should have discussed the phenomenon in another thread (although I would have downvoted you in that thread, since any discussion of being downvoted flouts HN guidelines).

2. You should have given it a chance, even after two downvotes. It's not unusual to receive one or two quick downvotes and then be upvoted back to full visibility if you're comment is unpopular but rational, unemotional, and no ad hominems or other personal attacks. For one, I would have upvoted it. In my experience, it's rare to see good but unpopular arguments downvoted to reduced visibility after the initial 20-30 mins.

Fuck it, let's just argue the other way and save some time.

What evidence is there that we should ignore the well-known design principles of encapsulation and separation-of-concerns and thus allow the TSA to access data held by other agencies?

Those are programming design principles, not security principles nor natural laws. It does not do to assume that principles in one domain carry over to other domains.

They are system-design principles, and one can consider that the TSA folks are Turing Complete, therefore the laws apply. Q.E.D.

Don't assume that they don't carry.

So, since the body is also likely turing complete via DNA, can I assume that DRY applies and preemptively remove one of your lungs? Give me a break.

Do you really believe that DRY in coding precludes redundancy in implementation?

It tends to forbid code duplication, which is what the lungs are. Redundant implementations are two implementations which work a different way, which no, are not forbidden by DRY.

> It tends to forbid code duplication, which is what the lungs are.

Lungs are not code duplication any more than running two instances of an application to provide greater peak performance or hot-standby is code duplication. You are confusing duplication of elements of the real system with duplication of specification (programming is executable specification, not the real system.)

I concede this point.

Lungs are more like load balancers, right?

You should've suggested (in the DRY sense) removing extra copies of sequences in DNA--excepting, you know, that I don't think that we know that is safe (those may be there for redundancy as well).

Perhaps you work somewhere where the concept of redundancy is important?

Stop being obtuse; you clearly seem to see the point I was getting at.

I certainly see the argument you were trying to make. I also think the way you tried to make it is totally invalid and casts no light on whether the TSA should or shouldn't use the processes they are planning to adopt.

Why is the TSA magically exempt from sound systems-engineering concepts? You never explained that.

Principle zero is that the system should correctly perform the work required by its owners. If what you're saying is that an additional system should be injected that has access to all the required information, and the TSA should query that system, then I won't argue. That would be a balancing act of coordination costs versus the cost of the technical debt added to the TSA, but I don't feel I have sufficient insight to analyze that balance where I currently am. Likewise if you are arguing any other rearrangement of information owners such that some process can access information and inform the TSA's decisions.

If what you're saying is that the TSA should not perform some work because it's not simple to do that work in accordance with other system design principles, then I fear you have fundamentally misunderstood what those principles are for.

I withdraw my claim that the TSA should not seek to optimize according to design principles. I still believe that you are applying them too broadly, but it isn't a position I care to defend at the moment.

Even if that was a valid application of DRY, no, it wouldn't, because you aren't the system owner, and nothing justifies anyone other than the system owner making changes to the system to achieve fidelity to any principle of system design.

Like many "programming design principles", they are in fact principles for the design of robust systems that are amenable to (1) reasoning about, and (2) adapting to changing circumstances, and are not at all special to the domain of programming.

Encapsulation and separation of concerns does not mean that data is inaccessible to requesters when it is needed. It just means it's accessed through the proper interfaces and the right clearances are given.

If the TSA has MORE information then there will be LESS hassle and MORE accuracy. That, multiplied by the number of people currently affected and delayed by the security checks should also improve the experience by quite a lot.

If the TSA has MORE information then there will be LESS hassle and MORE accuracy.

So, what is their current accuracy? We already know that no TSA --> no hassle.

Yours is at least a testable hypothesis.

That's the way it was before 911; before the Department of Homeland Security. After 911, there was a clusterfuck of confusion about who knew what because Customs didn't want to talk to the TSA who didn't want to talk to the Secret Service who didn't want to talk to.... Or that was what we were told.

In part to alleviate this symptom, the responsibilities for 22 departments were thrown together under the DHS. So, at least the administration running things at the time thought they saw evidence that it was needed.

So, there's no evidence, is what you're telling me, other than the presumed wisdom of those bozos.

That is indeed what I was saying- save for the fact there might be some evidence that requires special privilege to access, or might exist in the observations of some of those who were involved.

...at least the administration running things at the time thought...

IIRC, Bush2 was initially against the formation of the DHS. After a week of everyone in Congress asking why he didn't care about teh Children, and also why was he so against spending in their districts, he caved.

Incidentally, I don't assume that Bush2 was against DHS because of the sound organizational principle that the best way to make a group of poorly performing orgs worse is to pack them all together under an additional management layer. He might well not have cared at all, so he could use the opportunity to extract concessions from other politicians.

People care about security

The TSA doesn't do anything to make us more secure. They might (maybe) make you marginally more secure on the airplane, but if you stop and think about it... a terrorist doesn't need to blow up an airplane to cause terror. All they need is a large number of people compacted into a fairly small space, where their destructive devices can cause large numbers of injuries or deaths.

Like, for example...

...

in line in front of the TSA security checkpoint.

Yep, by adding another chokepoint / bottleneck, the TSA have created a new target. They haven't done anything to solve the problem, they've only moved it.

You're not allowed to take stuff through that checkpoint because it might be an explosive, so they take the stuff off you, and put it in a big bin, next to the line of people.

Yeah, I had an airport cop at Denver International tell me I couldn't park my family's minivan for 2 minutes in a loading zone while my wife came down the escalator from a floor up.

The minivan might be full of explosives, and I might blow the arrivals pick-up zone up while parked.

Why wouldn't I try to blow it up while cruising past in the stop-n-go stream of traffic whose drivers are looking for their person?

If this is the rubbish the TSA tells their trench-level grunts, then what kind of otherworldly nonsense circulates at higher levels in that "organization"?

"For the privacy advocates when it comes to public transportation like flying: what do you fear may happen as a result of greater background checks?"

I fear that some mistake, perhaps just data corruption in some gigantic database somewhere, will affect my government file and permanently ruin my life.