Comment by jmilloy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmilloy | Hacker News Reader

I think it's unfortunate that there are false positives. On the other hand, we are free to complain about our government, and that is fortunate.

But to those of you complaining, are you sure this isn't just another anecdote that supports your stereotypes? Or is our anti-authoritarian fetish getting in the way of the data (or lack there of) again?

Have any of us worked with a effective and practical system that never has false positives? Are you unhappy with the rate of false positives? Do you even know what that rate is? Are you saying you would you rather have more false negatives and fewer false positives? Surely anecdotal evidence is biased towards nasty false positives: we don't read about stories when someone triggers suspicion and is reasonably investigate before being released, but are you sure it never happens?

I'm not saying that I think it's acceptable to be wrong sometimes, or to treat people this way. But I'm also not convinced by anyone who doesn't have answers to the above questions.

I think that you are completely missing the point. The problem is not about false positives, the problem is about the abusive behaviour to false positives. I can totally understand that there are false positives but racial slurs, threats, shouting, refusal to provide water etc. are never ever justified.

Abusive behaviour of this kind might be just a personal failure of some employee... in that case they need to be fired and severely punished. If those things happen on multiple occasions and nothing happens, nobody is fired/punished, nobody apologises... than you have a reason to believe that it is a systematic failure to uphold to certain standards commonly associated with states that are not police states. That seems to be the case in the US.

That's fair. I tried to include this perspective as well. Personally I want to agree that this behavior is never ever justified, but do you know that being respectful has no impact on the number of actual violators that are caught? Instead, I expect there is a trade off, and I would sacrifice respect for increased efficacy, to an extent. Furthermore, the resources required to remove agents that misbehave compete with the resources to find violators. Ultimately, I think it's hard to tell from here if we're sacrificing too much respect given the results.

I'd rather not have to become an expert in border control; I pay taxes so that someone else can do that. I can see, however, that many people find it hard to trust that someone else might know more than them. I think it's a shame that there is not enough transparency; is assuming the worst and crying foul without proper data really the best we can do?

This just happened to my Aussie friend, although not to such a degrading degree. I don't think either event qualifies as a false positive.

In either case, there was no evidence at all of an overstay. That's like a spam filter looking at your inbox and arbitrarily picking one email and putting it in your spam folder; would you call that a false positive? To have a false positive, there must be some sort of algorithm/procedure/heuristic, i.e. some sort of non-random selection mechanism. Otherwise, you don't have a spam filter, you have spam roulette. And that's how it is at the border with these immigration officers.

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