The guy (girl?) you describe in the second sentence is very obvious to identify. The problem is not there.
I am in Quebec City. A terrorist killed 6 people here a few weeks ago. A young, quiet, white catholic guy with clean looks. He killed 6 muslims during their prayers.
Would that questionnaire have identified that young, quiet, white catholic terrorist killer?
> Would that questionnaire have identified that young, quiet, white catholic terrorist killer?
Possibly, but it's difficult to say based on your description, because age, skin color, general quietness, and religion are not on the questionnaire.
But to your broader point, could a questionnaire be written well enough to reliably identify all terrorists? If it only significantly improves detection, I'd think it would be worthwhile.
The problem with that reasoning is that if you rely on a detection method that's biased towards a specific target a competent terrorist organization can profile that method and then have a better than average change of passing through by behaving in an opposite way. That's why profiling doesn't work all that well against any sort of sophisticated enemy.
If he truly was a completely ordinary person by all outward appearances, then no questionnaire would identify him, and this one doesn't aim to. I don't know much about the Quebec suspect, but it seems like many of the Ideology, Research And Planning, and Social sections might have applied to him. I don't think this questionnaire is biased towards one type of terrorist.
In fact it seems like the whole point of this is to help agents identify less obvious suspects, so they don't only focus on the guy who keeps traveling back and forth from Syria and retweeting ISIS.
To be fair, the Quebec terrorist would have been caught on a couple of these items, but not all. Yes, this questionnaire would catch radical islamic terrorists but not the right-wing terrorist you mention, so it is only effective for a class of such possibly violent individuals.
If you apply a test like this to a few million people you will get tens of thousands of false positives. Those will clog up the works while in the meantime your quiet unassuming terrorist will walk right by under the radar and quite possibly will kill a bunch of people.
Most blood tests or tests for any major disease have a high rate of false positive, that's why you take the tests ALONG with a doctor analysing your symptoms (and that's there Bayes' theorem plays a big role).
So applying a single test to a huge general population makes little sense. But applying that to a population that already carries some traits is highly relevant.
Blood tests for diseases tend to have a much higher true positive rate as well because of substantial higher incidence rate of diseases for which simple blood tests exist than terrorism, besides that the cost of a false positive isn't that high (you just order another test to improve the odds, roughly at the same cost level as the first one).
Even Bayes can't make sense of garbage input, there has to be some relevance to the input numbers.
It's not magic, it's applied statistics.
If your probabilities are on the order of 'nonexistent' and your test has a false positive rate on the order of a few 10'ths of a % then you are wasting your time no matter what the method you use to analyze your data.
If your metric is simply "number of terrorists caught" then sure a broken test is better than no test.
But you are ignoring the cost of "catching" innocent people. Plus you are ignoring the cost of the administering the test.
You could dedicate your resources to actual detective work instead of wholesale dragnet operation in the hope that something useful turns up. Makes for good security theater though.
Uhm, what? The alternative is to have a few million people that you're concerned about for some reason and then have no way to exclude the vast majority of them from investigative interest.
The test is useful, just not useful enough to transform a random population into a list of suspects. It's useful for what the FBI says it's getting used for - determining how to allocate resources among a limited population that's already under suspicion. Eg, be more likely to assign an active agent if the case involves people with access to weapons.
> The alternative is to have a few million people that you're concerned about for some reason and then have no way to exclude the vast majority of them from investigative interest.
If you're concerned about a few million people to spot 10 (a high estimate) per year then you will need better tools than dragnet surveillance and questionnaires like these. Did you really expect to answer any of these questions about a would-be terrorist in such a way that it would help an investigation?
Check the questions, it's positively skewed towards one particular kind of terrorist (young Islamic males even though it does not state that outright it might as well be written there). And then you get your nice, upstanding Christian white-guy who murders 6 people in cold blood and would have murdered a whole lot more if he had the chance.
These questions are meaningless without accurate priors and accurate priors require incidence rates that are distinguishable from noise.
> A young, quiet, white catholic guy with clean looks.
Has media called him a terrorist even after he has done all that ? I doubt that. He was probably identified as a person with mental health issues.
A Canadian journalist like Tarak Fatah might get flagged as terrorist though he is an kick-ass islamic reformer. Tarak Fatah has extensively travelled in hotbeds of Islamic extremism, he is associated with and has engaged all the Islamic mullahs and currently runs a TV series debate with mullas titled "Fatah Ka Fatwah".
It is hard to catch terrorists by filling up questionnaires. Some of those questions however are obvious indicators of a threat. If you already know a person has travelled to a different country to participate in violence, I am not sure why you need to fill anything else.
The FBI is a predominantly white organization, over 88%<?> white. The rest are minorities used as pawns and analysts for infiltration and analysis of their respective ethnic populations. There's no way they're going to actively justify and develop a program to target other white terrorists/attackers/etc... They're just like the local police force except with bigger brains and some college degrees.
edit: I'd imagine the Canadian equivalent is the same since the US and Canada share a common background and approach in dealing with perceived threats to their "white supremacy".
Most of the questions are not religious-related, but related to violence, mobilization, etc. So if the young, quiet white catholic terrorist was doing any of those, he could be identified.
My guess is that the Columbine shooters could be flagged by the questionnaire.
I am in Quebec City. A terrorist killed 6 people here a few weeks ago. A young, quiet, white catholic guy with clean looks. He killed 6 muslims during their prayers.
Would that questionnaire have identified that young, quiet, white catholic terrorist killer?