Martin Seeger on Nostr: As a side note: during the invasion of Iraq, more than twenty years ago, I used to ...

As a side note: during the invasion of Iraq, more than twenty years ago, I used to summarize another problem with counterterrorism like this:

> **Killing one terrorist with a bomb produces ten new terrorists.**

The number ten was obviously rhetorical, not a statistic. But the underlying mechanism is remarkably similar.

Again, you have a selection problem. You are trying to kill a very small number of terrorists embedded in a much larger population of people who are not terrorists.

Your weapon and your intelligence are imperfect, so you inevitably produce false positives. Except that in this case, a false positive is not someone who gets investigated. It may be someone who gets killed.

And people tend not to react favorably to their children, parents, spouses, friends or neighbors being killed.

So the false positives feed back into the system. Every innocent person killed creates a circle of people with a very personal reason to hate whoever dropped the bomb.

Most of them will never become terrorists, of course. But you don't need many of them to do so before your counterterrorism operation starts producing some of the very thing it is supposed to eliminate.

In surveillance, false positives consume attention.

In kinetic counterterrorism, false positives can create enemies.

**Different consequences, same fundamental problem: when the target is extremely rare and your selection mechanism is imperfect, being wrong vastly more often than being right can dominate the entire system.**