Unneccessary proof that the vast majority of people are freaking out without thinking or analyzing.
| Google search string | Hit count |
| “terrorist attacks on the united states” | about 52,800 |
| “terrorist attacks” “united states” | about 1,080,000 |
| “incidence of terrorist attacks” | about 177 |
| “history of terrorist attacks” | about 420 |
| context “terrorist attacks” “united states” | about 179,000 |
All of this because I was trying to find something which spelled out how many terrorist attacks we’ve suffered in our history, or how many people were lost to terrorist attacks in our history. So much for that thought.
(it’s for a paper for class. We’re trying to argue that a national id system would have a ridiculous false positive rate. It’d be nice to know what a reasonable positive rate to expect would be.)
You may want to dig through back-issues of Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-Gram (assuming you haven’t already):
http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram.html
He’s a security expert who has frequently commented on the effectiveness of a national ID program, and false positives vs false negatives, etc. One of the chief points he makes is that the overwhelming majority of people are not terrorists, so pretty much no matter what percentage of false positives you get, you’re going to trigger more false positives than there are actual terrorists… (just as one example). Granted, some of that discussion has been related to using biometrics rather than a National ID, but the argument is the same. He also talks about the actual usefulness of a National ID, and whether or not it would actually be a viable security measure, even with a 100% success rate. Godd stuff that seems to be right in-line with what you’re looking for.
I don’t know that any of it is useful for the paper, but it’s good stuff to read, nonetheless. =)