time, which means that almost certainly 249 will be detected, and with only a 25% chance of missing

the last one. Great! However, out of the remaining 249,999,750 innocent civilians, 99.9% accuracy means 0.1% error, which means that 250,000 of them will be incorrectly labeled terrorist. Uh, oh! (These are called false positives.) The law enforcement problem is now that we have 250,250 people who have been labeled as terrorist by our diagnostic tests. Only about 1 in 1,000 of them is actually a terrorist. If we were mining for gold, we would say that the ore has been considerably enriched, since 1 in 1,000 is better than 1 in 1,000,000. Theres still a long way to go, though, before nding a nugget. But we are talking about peoples lives, freedom, and livelihoods here. The consequences to an innocent person of being incorrectly labeled a terrorist (or even suspected terrorist) can be very large. Suppose, out of the innocent people incorrectly labeled terrorist, 1 in 1,000 is sufcientlytraumatizedbytheexperiencesothatthey,orarelative,actuallybecomes a terrorist. (This is analogous to catching polio from the polio vaccine: extremely rare, and impossible with killed-virus vaccine, but a real phenomenon.) In this case, even after catching all 250 original terrorists, 250 new ones have been created by the screening process! Thenumbers Iveusedgiveabreak-evenscenario,but99.9%accuracyandspecicity is unrealistically high. More realistic numbers make the problem worse. Nobody knows what fraction of people traumatized as innocent victims of a government process are seriously radicalized. One in 1,000 is an uninformed guess, but the number could be signicantly higher.

Amass screening process like this is very likely to have costs that are much h