BBC News – Can statistics help catch terrorists?
By Daniel Miessler on February 2nd, 2010: Tagged as Security
“There are more than a 100 million people flying out of UK airports every year and you might be trying to foil one or two terrorist plots,” he says.
“Even if you had a profiling system that was 99.99% accurate, there would be 1 in 10,000 errors.
“If you consider that around 100 million people go through UK airports each year, that would mean 10,000 innocent people would trigger the system.”
“I would hope that in any training of staff, this is really rammed home.
“If you’re not going to cause enormous resentment about this, it’s got to be very delicately handled – maths tells you that.”
via news.bbc.co.uk
A great article on why profiling is nowhere near as easy as it seems.