Q: What country rates everyone who goes in and out of it, citizen or not, as to whether they are likely terrorists or criminals, won’t show its ratings to those rated, can’t be challenged about them, uses them to decide who can work for a wide variety of governments and companies, and plans to keep them for 40 years?

A: the U.S.:

Virtually every person entering and leaving the United States by air, sea or land is scored by the Homeland Security Department’s Automated Targeting System, or ATS. The scores are based on ATS’ analysis of their travel records and other data, including items such as where they are from, how they paid for tickets, their motor vehicle records, past one-way travel, seating preference and what kind of meal they ordered.

Homeland Security assigns terror scores to travelers CNN, 10:10 a.m. EST, December 1, 2006

Why does this bring to mind the Base Rate Fallacy? Building a bigger haystack doesn’t help find a few needles. Spending money instead on programs that would be more likely to produce good results would seem like better risk management to me.

-jsq