Tom Guarriello examines false positives in Homeland Security screening, where people get flagged as terrorists with no evidence. A 13-year-old girl detained during a layover, a friend stopped at the Mexico border, and a denied entry show the pattern. He asks how HS tunes its detection system and whether agents make consistent errors.
Wahai, it's Tom Guarriello, coming to you today from lovely Santa Barbara, California. Gorgeous out here, absolutely gorgeous. I just watched Joy's video, Fringe111. Of course, I'll put the link over here. And now, you may have watched the video I made a week or so ago, just about a week now, about why we haven't been attacked yet again here in the United States. Now, you may have also seen the video that I made not too long ago, a couple of months, about a friend of mine, uh, who had been stopped by Homeland Security at the— upon re-entering the country, uh, from Mexico. Stopped in Houston, uh, and I'm gonna say hassled, maybe not harassed, but hassled.
You may have also seen Dr.
Liemer's, uh, story about being apprehended upon his attempted entry into the United States a couple of months ago, uh, and not— and denied entry into the United States. And now Joy is telling this story about this 13-year-old girl and her father who were stopped on a layover on their way from New Jersey down to Florida and put in cages by Homeland Security.
So now that's just me, one person, who now knows of at least 3 instances instances of what I'm gonna call—
of what are called false positives. And you know what a false positive is, right?
A false positive is when a system that is designed to evaluate an occurrence says that something is an occurrence, but in fact it turns out not to be an occurrence.
So, for example, if you have a test for predicting whether or not some disease is present and you test the, the whatever it is that you would test in order to evaluate the presence of the disease and the test says yes, there is this disease and in fact it turns out over time that no, there is not this disease, then that's a false positive, right?
There are also false negatives, but you know, that's when you say, gee, there's no disease, and in fact there turns out to be a disease. Now what we have here are three, at least in my, you know, my little experience, three false positives on the part of our Homeland Security system for determining whether or not someone is a dangerous terrorist and treated as if the system had effectively diagnosed a positive. Yes, this is a dangerous person. Now, false positives have consequences. What I'm interested in is what are the consequences of false positives within our Homeland Security system? Is there a revision of the testing process when we find false positives at what I'm only going to have to extrapolate based on my little experience to be a fairly high rate? I could be wrong. I may be overgeneralizing that we have a lot of false positives in our, uh, terrorist identification and apprehension process, but I'd sure like to know what the consequences are of system redesign. Now, personal consequences to the people who apply the system is something else entirely, and I think, you know, it's fair to wonder whether or not some agents of the Homeland Security assessment process are more prone to false positives than others. I'd sure want to know about those statistics if I were evaluating the effectiveness of our Homeland Security system. So, um, and I'd be curious to know how many of you know about instances of false positives, because if we have amongst us a significant body of information that leads us to believe that we have a system that is, let's call it, hair-triggered, at least then we could have a debate about whether or not we believe the system should be operating at such a level of hair trigger. And if we do not believe that, or let's put it this way, if we do believe that, let's have some discussion about the implications of that, not just for this 13-year-old girl that Joy is talking about, but for the rest of us who are now, of course, living with the specter of being thrown into a cage like Dr. Liemer was, um, as a result of who knows what. Remember, in Dan's case, Dr. Leamer, he never really understood what it was that led him to be apprehended with clarity. At least I don't remember that he knew that. So anyhow, excuse me, I'm interested in your experience. Do you know of false positives in the Homeland Security system? And I'd be very interested in knowing how Homeland Security is evaluating the effectiveness of its, uh, algorithms, its processes, the things it uses to make determinations when it seems to be leading to so many false positive identifications. So take it easy. Uh, pretty soon you're going to get to see Peggy's dress because the wedding is later today.
So take care and see you guys soon. Bye-bye.
