So it costs about 4 million dollars to recover from the United States government accidentally, arbitrarily ruining your life.
What a sad and terrifying place America has become.
We're stabbing ourselves in the heart with a fork.
1 human error is not a statistic, nor does it represent the system in any way.
I still like America and I'm okay with this happening... The system took some time, but it ultimately worked. Which is a credit to it, and not a penalty against it.
More than likely, the 7 year figure involved about a month of form submitting, a month or two of figuring out the system/process, a few days in court, and a whole lot of wait time.
At the end, this complicated matter worked itself out. In a secret court no less. Which is a testament to itself.
If you were accidentally put on the no fly list tomorrow would it be okay that you were not allowed to board an airplane anywhere in or bound for the us for 7 years?
I understand mistakes. That's no problem. The problem is refusal to admit a mistake except when ordered to by a court. All the government had to do was say, "Woops, misfiled that, you're off the list."
http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2014/02/ibraru...
It was mostly waiting time (95% of it from the looks of it), everyone trying to figure out jurisdiction and law issues, and the fact they were suing for lots and lots of money from the start - that made the government "fight" it by mostly conceding on the issues.
This whole story attempts to spin 1 human error event against the system.
In case you missed that part, the statistics quoted in the paragraph starting at page 36, line 22 are particularly interesting.
Wow.
This is about as far as you can get from "the system worked", by the way.
Millions of success events vs. 1 human error has no conclusions except that the system works.
I doubt you'd measure success exclusively by the number of false positives but you'd also need to factor in the impact of a false positive.
For eg: There was an x-ray machine [1] with a software bug that would accidentally deliver a dose 100 times the intended dose. I'm sure the machine operated correctly thousands of times however there were "at least 6 accidents" and 3 deaths (worst case scenario). One would not say that this system works.
Anyway, this isn't some big argument against America. It's an argument against perpetrating a system that fails to correct its errors. With criticism, and bugfixes, it will become better.
The inability to admit the error and fighting back is the proof that the system doesn't work. Intentionally.
But if you like the statistics and probability, what is the probability that this is the only case?
To help you along the way, consider the fact that the clerk here was not even aware he was doing it wrong...