The terrifying surveillance case of Brandon Mayfield
What, exactly, is terrifying? The FBI did an excellent job of making connections between suspicious facts, the sort of connections that should have been made to prevent the 9-11 attacks.<p>It is absurd to claim that this should not have happened. All detection methods have a false positive rate. Judging by what has shown up in the media, the FBI has a counterterrorism false positive rate of one person every few years. That is a stupendously low rate for such a rare yet politically-charged task.<p>Let's not forget their other famous false positive terrorism case: the anthrax case. Their needle in a haystack search turned up a false positive, but it also turned up the true positive.<p>The only terrifying thing here is that they suspected him of being a serial mass murderer, and then proceeded to apply <i>such poor spycraft that a false positive was spooked</i>. There are going to have a hard time catching real baddies being that sloppy.