Apolitical statement #1: In any large, high-complexity search space where time and resources are limited, you’re just not going to cover the space without using heuristics to guide the search.

Apolitical statement #2: In a nutshell, the heuristic-based search for terrorists is (and was always going to be) problematic because:

• heuristics *always* miss
• heuristics that are good at hitting positives tend to be kind of shitty at missing negatives, and vice versa
• misses on positives (subject X was a terrorist that the search did not identify) and hits on negatives (subject X was misidentified as a terrorist) both really, really suck

There’s a rich an interesting philosophical/political debate to be had over whether we should, as a society, prefer to implement a search that fails in one direction or the other (failing to identify subjects who subsequently harm innocent people, or harming innocent people ourselves).  But that’s not really what I came here to talk about.

I came to say that when we actually get more *information* about what heuristics are likely to work, and what heuristics are unlikely to work, we should (at least temporarily) set aside our positions in the philosophical/political debate to absorb findings that *could* advance the state of the search science.

Link: MI5 released some interesting study results the other day (via CryptoGram).

This entry was posted on Monday, September 15th, 2008 at 9:11 am and is filed under security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.