[IP] more on EFF: American Travelers to Get Secret 'Risk Assessment' Scores
Begin forwarded message:
From: Adam Fields <ip20398470293845@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: December 1, 2006 3:10:14 PM EST
To: David Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: ip@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [IP] EFF: American Travelers to Get Secret 'Risk
Assessment' Scores
For IP, if you wish:
On Thu, Nov 30, 2006 at 05:31:29PM -0500, David Farber wrote:
[...]
"The government is preparing to give millions of
law-abiding citizens 'risk assessment' scores that will
follow them throughout their lives," said EFF Senior
Counsel David Sobel. "If that wasn't frightening enough,
none of us will have the ability to know our own score, or
to challenge it. Homeland Security needs to delay the
deployment of this system and allow for an informed public
debate on this dangerous proposal."
[...]
Suppose that someone is flagged by the system and that person is
actually a dangerous criminal. What's the right response? Simply don't
let them board the plane? Additional searching? Arrest them? Nowhere
have I heard a discussion of what should happen here. Ideally, I'd
assume, a senior enough law enforcement official would be at the scene
in order to make a real decision about what should be done. Of course,
such a senior person would also have the authority to say "Oh, wait,
this is a false positive. The system has identified someone who isn't
a threat.".
And there's the rub - these two go hand in hand. Without the ability
to weed out the false positives, the system is also guaranteed to fail
to deal with a real threat. Making it easy for innocent people to
clear themselves is critical to having the system work at all. It's
not enough to identify the suspected threats - you have to eventually
identify the real ones.
--
- Adam
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