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Official development blog for the PARANOIA roleplaying game. No description is available at your security clearance. The Computer is your friend.

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

PARANOIA in the real world: DHS pre-crime initiative 

At The Atlantic, a site that improves by the week if not by the day, Oxford Internet Institute student Alexander Furnas analyzes the weaknesses of FAST (Future Attribute Screening Technology), a new "pre-crime" screening program that lets loyal citizens in the Department of Homeland Security mark you as a terrorist before you even do anything:
A program like FAST is doomed from the word go by a preponderance of false positives. We should ask, in a world where we are already pass through full-body scanners, take off our shoes, belts, coats and only carry 3.5 oz containers of liquid, is more stringent screening really what we need and will it make us any safer? Or will it merely brand hundreds of innocent people as potential terrorists and provide the justification of pseudo-scientific algorithmic behavioral screening to greater invasions of their privacy?
(Via Boing Boing.)
Posted by: Allen Varney / 12:37 PM

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