The simple math problem that blows apart the NSA’s surveillance justifications. This may as well have eleventy as the answer for all the good this snooping does, not to mention a gigantic waste of money.
*Out of every million people, 1 will be a terrorist, and 1000 (0.1 percent of 1 million) will be false positives. Therefore, Jeff’s probability is 1/(1000+1) = 0.001, or 0.1 percent.
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If the clowns at the NSA would concentrate on the right people the numbers would look better. You know, like look any anyone with an Islamic name.
hat would be profiling, and we all know profiling is racist and illegal, until Obama and his Dept of Injustice are gone.
Simple math:
Muslim=Terrorist
This is nothing more then the NSA's excuse to spy on the American people, and the justification for their bloated budgets and massive databases. Of course Quagmire uses it to keep Congress and the Courts in line as well.
Math's actually not quite right, though close enough to be accurate to 6 decimal places. It's the law of total probability. If the chance of any given non-terrorist triggering a false alarm is 0.001 and the chance of any person being a terrorist is 0.000001, the probability of a false alarm is (1-0.000001)*0.001, or the total population, minus the probability of being a terrorist, times the chance of a false alarm. It works out to be 0.000999999.
The chance of an alarm triggering for a true terrorist is still 0.000001 because it's probability is (1-.999999)*1 for the percent of the population being a terrorist times the probability the machine will detect them.
Now, the probability any given alarm is fake is chance any given test will result in a false alarm (0.000999999) divided by the sum of the chance an alarm is triggered (0.000001 + 0.000999999). The actual probability of any alarm being false is 0.999000998... or close enough to 99.9001%. Slightly more than the article predicted. To get the probability the alarm was correct, simply subtract that from 100% to get a 0.0999% chance of a false alarm.
Thanks for reading this exciting* installment of A Bored Engineer Does Math Problems!
*Exciting can be interpreted in an only slightly more literal view than most liberals view the words of the Constitution.
Oh my! I'm so ex....zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz (j/k)
Like every other law enforcement tool, it will expand beyond its initial use. Look at RICO. Eventually it will be pointed out that just looking for Islamic terrorists is racist and we need to even the results.
It sort of lays bare the true aims of the National Subjugation Agency -eh?
The NSA can't find many terrorists using their mass surveillance methods, but I imagine they have found plenty of conservatives.
Their purpose isn't like;y to locate any terrorists- that's just the sales pitch. What they're doing makes sense if the aim is to compile a searchable database on any American deemed to be inconveniently and subversively conservative any time in the future.