More Monitoring Makes Us All Less Secure

[Monitoring] increases cost and ensures that innocent people will be investigated more often. The reason is simple statistics: Very few people are guilty of serious crimes, and all of these automatic monitoring systems have relatively high rates of false positives.

I’ll explain this using made-up numbers vastly in favour of monitoring to show how this works. This is a simplistic model, ignoring stuff like false negatives, but I want to stack this in favour of monitoring to make absolutely clear that this can not possibly be a good thing. Let’s assume three things:

• Let’s assume that 1 in 1000 people is guilty of a serious crime that can be caught by monitoring him (in reality, the number is far lower)
• Let’s assume that the average monitoring solutions has 5% false positives, i.e. the monitoring system thinks something is wrong when the person really did nothing wrong in 5% of all cases (in reality, that number can be far higher because it’s usually almost impossible to distinguish guilty people from innocent people based on their data)
• Let’s assume that the system finds every guilty person (this is impossible; in reality, these systems only find a very small percentage of all guilty people)

Using these made-up numbers biased in favour of monitoring systems, we find out that for each guilty person the system detects, it detects 50 innocent people (realistic numbers would make this even more staggering). Even with the odds vastly in favour of monitoring systems, only 2% of all people singled out by such systems are actually guilty!

von LKM