Martin Seeger on Nostr: In this case, there is also a simple mathematical reason why mass surveillance works ...

In this case, there is also a simple mathematical reason why mass surveillance works like shit.

You have three ingredients:<li>a very large population,</li><li>a tiny number of actual terrorists,</li><li>and a detection system with a measurable false-positive rate.</li>

That combination is mathematically nasty.

Assume you monitor one million people and ten of them are actually terrorists. Now assume you have an extraordinarily good detection system: it identifies 90% of the terrorists and has a false-positive rate of only 0.1%.

It will correctly identify nine terrorists.

But among the 999,990 innocent people, a 0.1% false-positive rate produces roughly **1,000 false alarms**.

So your supposedly excellent surveillance system gives you about 1,009 alerts, of which only nine are real. More than **99% of your alerts are false positives**.

And this example is deliberately generous. A false-positive rate of just **0.1% is unrealistically low** for a real-world system trying to infer something as vague and complicated as terrorist intent from communications, behavior, associations, travel patterns, social media activity and other surveillance data. At 1%, the same example would produce roughly **10,000 false positives for nine true positives**. At 5%, it would produce nearly **50,000**.

This is the base-rate problem. When the thing you are looking for is extremely rare, even a remarkably accurate detection system can produce vastly more false positives than true positives. In the real world, where detection is messy and the criteria themselves are ambiguous, the problem gets much worse.

And now you have created a second problem: alarm fatigue.

Someone has to investigate all those innocent people. Analysts learn that almost every alarm they see is bullshit. Attention becomes the scarce resource. The system designed to find the needle in the haystack responds to the difficulty of finding the needle by continuously adding more hay.

Mass surveillance therefore has a fundamental scaling problem: **collecting more data is easy. Producing more alerts is easy. Producing more human attention is not.**