RE: Uncle Larry in the news

I think I read that Oracle were planning to donate the software. I know that they already get a *lot* of business from government contracts. But this is nothing more than Larry trying to get some free publicity, and maybe sell some lucrative consulting and support work. Scott McNealy from Sun is also jumping on the bandwagon because a) no-one wants to buy his Java smartcard and b) he doesn't mind who runs Big Brother's database so long as it isn't on x86/NT.

Now, Oracle (see, I am on-topic :0) )have some pretty fancy visual information retrieval stuff that could maybe be useful for face recognition, right? But (referring to Schneier's analysis, http://www.counterpane.com/crypto-gram-0109a.html#3) even 99.99% accuracy isn't enough. That is, if the person is a known terrorist there is a 99.99% change of the software recognizing him or her, and of a person is not a terrorist, then there is a 99.99% change that the software will not think that they are.

Now let's assume that one in every 10 million airline passengers is a
(known) terrorist. Even this is difficult, because remember the
hijackers all had legal IDs, their own, and no criminal records that would have made airport security suspicious. All passengers are scanned by this system. For every terrorist that is caught, there will be 1000 false alarms. That's crying wolf too often for anyone to take it seriously. And, in the real world, the system isn't anywhere even *near* 99.99% accurate. Change it down to 95% and run the numbers...

The solution isn't technological at all, but technological solutions are a "magic bullet" used by people too "liberal" to face up to the fact that WASP grandmothers from the Midwest don't hijack airliners, but there is an easily recognizable subset of the world's population who do seem to produce most of the world's hijackers.

g  

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Wednesday, October 17, 2001 11:10 PM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

Yeah, but what if you were the DBA for that database? ;-)

The article did say that some "prominent civil libertarians" were not completely averse to the idea. The ID card would only be mandatory for non-citizens and voluntary for citizens. I confess that as a recovering libertarian I'm conflicted. We already have to prove our identity for social
security cards and driver's licenses (to a lessor degree and varying by state). A national plan would just be taking a situation that already exists
and making it bigger and more effecient. ;-| Of course what's voluntary today can more easily become mandatory tomorrow.

Hmmm... I wonder what the support fees would be for such a "beast?" ;-)

Steve Orr

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