Why government sucks, part 11,982 in our ∞ part series

Terrorist watch lists are probably a good idea. But because the government is, well, the government, it doesn't really care whether the watch list is right. Their incentive is to make sure that absolutely nobody who might be a terrorist is able to do absolutely anything in the US.

These lists always have to trade off between Type I error (false positive) and Type II error (false negative). Since we live in an imperfect world, you have to decide whether to err on the side of ensnaring the innocent, or missing the guilty.

But people building terror watch lists only get punished if they introduce Type II error. Hence, they have no incentive to avoid Type I error. Which is why they have an easy procedure to put people on, and no obvious way to remove them again.

The rest of us, however, have to trade off the risk of getting killed in a terrorist attack, and the risk of never being able to fly or have a bank account again. With something like one in three hundred Americans on watch lists, it seems to me that we have gone too far.

Comments

Megan, you've heard the counterargument about these kinds of posts but you apparently don't find it persuasive for some reason. The counterargument is: this coffee is too hot! Hence, down with capitalism!

I could argue that the result of watch lists is a greater sense of security, and the voters like that sense of security more than they are annoyed by too many watch lists; so your complaint that there are too many watch lists and it's too hard to get off is simply asserting your personal preference against the revealed preference of the majority of the voters. But I think that would be a silly argument.

Instead, I have a far more subtle analysis of this situation. Because it is too hard for people to get their names taken off watch lists, I believe that we should institute systems for making it easier to get your name taken off watch lists.

That is all. We may now return to our pointless ideological bickering, which we treasure.

Posted by brooksfoe | March 20, 2008 12:00 PM

Brooksfoe-

The problem with instituting such a process is seen right now with Gitmo. The burden will not rest on the gov't to prove that a person should be listed; it will lie with the individual to prove that he shouldn't. To which the government will respond, "well we have secret evidence, blah blah blah." And they will get away with it.

Situations like these show why trading liberty for security is a dumb idea. You end up with the mere appearance of security (since risk can never be totally removed, especially for terrorism) and the total destruction of liberty.

Posted by Civilized Crank | March 20, 2008 12:12 PM

You need to start reading Bruce Schneier's blog at
http://schneier.com/blog/

Posted by wiredog | March 20, 2008 12:18 PM

But Civilized, that's just an expression of complete defeatism. We have warrants for the government to execute a search of your house, and over time we've developed a sophisticated legal tradition about what the government has to show before it can search your house. What we need is a similarly strict set of demands on government establishing what it needs to do before it puts your name on a watch list. And "secret evidence" should be an oxymoron.

I mean, the thing is, it's not really rational to support the complete elimination of government watch lists. It's really kind of crazy to think that Osama Bin-Laden should be allowed to purchase a transcontinental airline ticket. So given that, we need to work out some better protocols for making sure that ordinary citizens' rights and conveniences aren't sacrificed.

Posted by brooksfoe | March 20, 2008 12:25 PM

brooksfoe,

I believe that we should institute systems for making it easier to get your name taken off watch lists.

And how do we go about getting that instituted? What is my leverage over those in charge in order to get it instituted?

The "ideological bickering" is actually relevant here. If the airlines were running the security, I (and the other thousand people mistakenly on the list) would call up American Airlines and say "Because of your crappy security procedure, I have to take a train to Chicago instead of your planes!" And after thousands do this, the CFO goes running to the CEO and they sit down and argue with the CSO.

If I made the same call to TSA, they'd just issue an inter-departmental memo saying they have credible evidence that a suspected terrorist will be on a train to Chicago soon, perhaps we should raise the threat level and take defensive action.

Posted by Geoff | March 20, 2008 12:33 PM

Well, as someone once said: "America is at an awkward age, it's too late to work within the system and too early to start shooting the bastards."

Face it! America has become a police state. It's a relatively 'kind and gentle' police state, as these things go, but it's a police state nonetheless. And the really sad thing is that the vast majority of your fellow citizens are perfectly OK with that because " .. the only freedom they really care about is freedom from responsibility." The old H.L. Mencken saw about frightening the populace with imaginary hobgoblins is even truer today than it was then.

P.S. > Does anybody know the source of that Quote that I alluded to above about 'freedom from responsibility'? I've seen it attributed to Edward Gibbon in "Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire", but I've never been able to find an exact citation including the context or the chapter heading.

Posted by john w. | March 20, 2008 12:44 PM

What do you want to bet that if Obama (or Hillary) is elected then this whole issue will disappear from the press whether they fix things or not?

Posted by Ryan w. | March 20, 2008 12:47 PM

Hmmm, here I am again agreeing with brooksfoe. We have administrative agencies and ALJ's hearing cases every day where people (some citizens, some not) argue they should/should not be subject to some government action (deportation, social security benefits, taxes, etc.). They get reviewed by real courts in due course. No reason we can't implement a similar system to get your name off the terror watch list. It's inefficient and expensive, but it is a decent process which works reasonably well.

Posted by Rob Lyman | March 20, 2008 12:56 PM

"What do you want to bet that if Obama (or Hillary) is elected then this whole issue will disappear from the press whether they fix things or not"

Hardly. This was raised by the ACLU, which was brutal on the Clinton I regime.

Megan, your analysis assumes that the terror watch list is effective at all. I've yet t see a conclusive argument that the watch list produces anything but Type I errors. So we're getting lots of false positive for ... zero true positives.

Posted by Mike | March 20, 2008 1:07 PM

The watch list has nearly a million names, Megan, but I'd bet dollars to donuts that most of those names aren't Americans, so "1 in 300 Americans" is a thoroughly misleading factoid.

The point of the lists is to get names of terrorists and their supporters, and people investigated for possibly connections (it's a watchlist, not a confirmed terrorist list, for a reason) not "American terrorists and American supporters".

It's useful to follow the ACLU's links to the 2008 OIG report on how the nominations work. Note: "In general, individuals who are subjects of ongoing FBI
counterterrorism investigations are nominated to TSC for inclusion on the
watchlist, including persons who are being preliminarily investigated to
determine if they have links to terrorism.".

The "watchlist" is NOT a "list of terrorists". It's a list of people who are being or have been watched, as well as a grab-bag of anyone the CIA or the like thought might be anything important or worth looking at when the list was created.

The same reports also point out that they're doing deep review on the list to remove bad data - the difficulty being, well, doing it. It's a lot of work, and as you rightfully point out, the hazard of error is deeply asymmetrical.

Re. Brooksfoe's suggestion, how does he imagine getting "your name" off the list will work, if the person who has the same name but is rightfully on it is still at large?

What the lists need are, whenever possible, more (appropriate) data, not "removal of names". Then all of the "Robert Johnsons" who are false matches can be trivially dismissed from inquiry by the fact that they're the wrong age, skin color, or whatever doesn't match the actual intended object.

(And yes, the lists are a stupid idea, but the CYA factor at all political levels makes them unremovable, in practice. And no, this has nothing to do with political party.)

Posted by Sigivald | March 20, 2008 1:17 PM

Civilized Crank wrote: The problem with instituting such a process is seen right now with Gitmo....Situations like these show why trading liberty for security is a dumb idea. You end up with the mere appearance of security (since risk can never be totally removed, especially for terrorism) and the total destruction of liberty.

Uh...are you stuck at home today with both constipation and the gout? Gitmo is a blip on the radar, and in any case, it primarily held foreign nationals whose own governments refused extradition for some reason. The only clear case of systematic abuse was Jose Padilla, although again, in any previous battlefield he might have been summarily shot for treason upon capture, so while his time in no-man's land was unjust, it is certainly not the worst thing that could have happened to him.

At any rate, I also agree with brooksfoe here -- you can't NOT have some sort of watchlist for those with genuine terrorism associations, but there can and should be a high bar for placing names on it and a clear and structured process for demanding removal.

Posted by anony_mouse_ | March 20, 2008 1:26 PM

Megan, that 1 in 300 statistic is a fallacy.

The list includes hundreds of thousands of non-Americans. Given the size of the world and the nature of terrorism, it's even possible that the majority of the people on the list aren't even American.

Posted by Nessuno | March 20, 2008 1:38 PM

I was hoping that a little sanity in getting people off the list would start when Senator Kennedy got on the list. (Well, technically some other T. Kennedy, but the Senator got kicked off a flight.) Bit no luck. Maybe if we get a few Republican Senators on the list as well (the ones who actually use commercial flights), we'll get somewhere. At least, one may hope.

Posted by wj | March 20, 2008 2:32 PM

technically some other T. Kennedy

E. Kennedy. And are we confident he wasn't kicked off for being a drunken lout?

Posted by Rob Lyman | March 20, 2008 2:39 PM

The Kennedies should be on a watchlist saying they can't fly planes. I think they're OK to ride.

Posted by brooksfoe | March 20, 2008 9:46 PM

Re: how does he imagine getting "your name" off the list will work, if the person who has the same name but is rightfully on it is still at large?

Perhaps the list should include a secondary list: names, birth dates and social security numbers for Americans who have been cleared and if someone is challenged because he has the same name as a terrorist suspect he could provide the other two pieces of data (with documentary proof of course) and be cleared through any hassles.
Also, if they know enough about these suspects to put them on the list shouldn't they at least have a photo of them and some idea how old they are (within a couple of years at least, maybe not an exact birthdate) so they could check against anyone else? At least when the police are looking for a suspect they don't just rely on a name, they have some sort of physical description and some few other facts about the person. I fail to see why Homeland Security or whoever creates these lists should be less competent about this than your average police department.

Posted by Jonf | March 20, 2008 10:33 PM

I disagree that they don't have an incentive to risk Type II to avoid Type I. It's a matter of resources. TSA might as well go ahead and prepare themselves for being raked over the coals by Congress the next time there is a terrorist incident involving an airplane because their list is so large that it's all but guaranteed to make them focus on false positives to the exclusion of everything else.

Posted by MikeT | March 20, 2008 11:05 PM

I happen to be one of two people in the world with the same name. I know pretty much about the other person, whose exploits are well documented in Google.
Let's just say that said person is an American citizen in good standing, no criminal record, and that the activity she's carried out that made her a suspect was legal and approved by authorities.
Which means that in most of my flights I am subject to additional screening. Sometimes the screeners cannot speak proper English. Sometimes they're too bored to be able to speak coherently. This means sometimes there are misunderstandings and they talk to me curtly. It becomes sadly predictable.
A things nobody notices, though: she is an American citizen and I am not. She is in her twenties and I, alas, am old enough to be her parent. And last but not least, she is female and I am quite clearly not.
(Sigh)

Posted by Omitted for obvious reasons | March 21, 2008 8:59 AM

To John W: I got interested in your quote, so I started searching. I found two that seem similar in sentiment to what you have in mind:

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.
Soren Kierkegaard (1813 - 1855)

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.
Mark Twain (1835 - 1910), Following the Equator (1897)

But there are others that are apt to the current conversation or to many other topics of today. I like these:

I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.
James Madison (1751 - 1836)

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
Justice Louis D. Brandeis, dissenting, Olmstead v. United States, 277 US 479 (1928)

On Obama's recent speech, I think this is to the point:

Without freedom from the past, there is no freedom at all, because the mind is never new, fresh, innocent.
Krishnamurti

And on the financial crisis, ponder these:

Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err. It passes my comprehension how human beings, be they ever so experienced and able, can delight in depriving other human beings of that precious right.
Mahatma Gandhi (1869 - 1948), 1931

Freedom is the right to be wrong, not the right to do wrong.
John G. Riefenbaker

Finally, on the dreadful election coming up, never forget this:

The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental or spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.
John Stuart Mill (1806 - 1873), On Liberty, 1859

The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means.
Georges Bernanos (1888 - 1948), "Why Freedom?" The Last Essays of Georges Bernanos, 1955

Posted by Carl the Sailorman | March 21, 2008 10:34 AM

Whats this about the governement having a specific method of getting warrants to search houses?

The Supreme court recently determined that a search is valid, and evidence admissable, even in the case of a no knock warrant being served at the WRONG ADDRESS.

This essentially means, that as long as they have a valid warrant, for anywhere, they can crash through your door, steal your stuff, break what they dont take, use it as evidence in court against you, and there isnt anything you can do about it. So how does that protect you exactly these days?

Posted by John III | March 21, 2008 9:47 PM