Let’s Be Reasonable
By Charles Clendenen, Infoglide Director of Professional Services
A recent post, “Terrorist Watchlist, Troubling Flaws Revealed”, starts out by making a valid point. If the terrorist watchlist is flawed, then the name matching results against such a list will be flawed. The author then goes on to reach related conclusions through rationalization rather than reasoning.
To be fair, it helps to understand the technology behind the matching in order to reach a reasonable conclusion. The author assumes that using inexact matching to reduce false negatives will necessarily multiply the number of false positives. In the absence of other factors, that would be accurate. But it turns out that if in addition to the name you add additional attributes like date of birth and gender to the process, identity resolution technology greatly reduces the number of additional false positives during the initial screening to an acceptable and manageable level.
We’ve written often here about achieving a balance between security and privacy. In an early post entitled “Privacy and Security Advocates: It’s a Good Thing We Can’t All Get Along,” we addressed the tension between privacy and security:
Achieving a balance between privacy and security is critically important to the survival of our American democracy. At this juncture in our history, the threat of terrorism has caused us to restrict some rights to privacy for the sake of national security. Without a certain level of security then American lives will be lost. Conversely, without a certain level of privacy, the American way of life will be lost. And at times, we as a nation have made mistakes when the pendulum has swung too far either way. Fortunately, we seem to keep returning to a state of equilibrium. It’s the howls of protest that arise when proponents of one side earns a win over the other, the constant, never-ending debate that keeps both sides in check and ensures a perpetual balance.
The reason we confidently address the issue is because we’re backed by sophisticated identity resolution technology that can be configured to be amazingly accurate. Sometimes people think that technology is the problem. In this case, identity resolution technology provides the solution.
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