angrymnk wrote:
Hmm, I obviously disagree. Few would disagree that Israel has pretty good security on their airports. How they do it is not exactly a secret, and security through obscurity was repeatedly shaken in its foundations over the past few years ( I have stopped counting smaller breaches ). It is not that it is unscientific. It is that it does not work well ( and then there is a question liberty, privacy and all that fun stuff ).
The last sentence is all that really matters. My issue is with declaring the process to be unscientific, which was basically the entire thrust of the article and is, IMO, the wrong approach if you want to critique said process.
Another issue is your completely nonsensical use of the phrase "security through obscurity". That phrase refers to a security methodology which relies on people simply not knowing where you hid your stuff. It doesn't at all refer to a security methodology that relies on people not knowing what your methodology is. Trying to apply it to the latter case would invalidate all "secret knowledge" based security as insecure. So your password isn't secure because it merely requires people to not know what it is. Um... Silly.
Security through obscurity would be not having any password at all and simply relying on the fact that the internet is big so the odds of someone finding and stealing your stuff is small (or just hoping terrorists can't find potentially damaging targets to hit out of all the less important ones out there). Which *is* a terrible security model. Again though, it's not remotely applicable to not wanting people to know what pattern of behaviors you look for to red flag people as potential terrorists. In the same way not wanting to tell people your password is a perfectly reasonable action to take which one might expect would increase one's odds of securing whatever they're doing.
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The key phrase in your case may the "accepted methodologies". Just because they are accepted does not mean they are right. Not too long ago it was accepted methodology to let out blood to cure people, classify homosexuality as a mental disorder and to add cocaine to CocaCola just to name a few.
Then take issue with the article, not me. The article attempted to argue that the method used was somehow not the right one to use, not because of moral/ethical concerns, or even because it might not work as well as others, but simply by declaring it to "fly in the face" of accepted scientific method.
I'll also point out that the article writer makes assumptions about what constitutes scientific method that aren't technically correct. While peer review can be an important part of the process, it's not what makes the method "scientific". Um... And the whole thing is just a disconnect anyway. What's with trying to paint something as unscientific? It just doesn't fit here.
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Now, to address the method as unscientific. Would you say that classifying you as a terrorist on a glorified hunch is scientific?
Setting aside that "no-fly" doesn't equal "terrorist", sure. Why not? Most scientific advances (I'd argue all of them) started with a "glorified hunch". Again, my issue is even trying to define this in a "scientific vs non-scientific" manner. I just see that as a real disconnect. Remember that scientific method is a
method. It's a process by which you try things, see what works, and then make adjustments and try again. Someone coming into the middle of that process and declaring that since the results today aren't 100% perfect that whatever is being done is "non scientific" is pretty silly. You could more or less erase every single technological advancement in the history of man if you tried to apply that standard.
And no, an open peer review process has nothing to do with it. A single person, working alone in his basement, continually refining his work over time, despite acting in complete secrecy can be using and almost certainly *is* using "scientific method". As long as he's testing his results and attempting to make changes designed to improve the next result, he's using scientific method. Success or failure doesn't make it science. Doing it in the dark versus the light of day doesn't make it science. The author basically seems to want to apply an open standard to all science, but that's just not what science is.
Hence my issue with that line of reasoning. Say you don't like it because it's profiling people and that's bad. Or because of the privacy issues. Or that it's unethical to restrict flight based on said profiling. Heck. Say you don't like the lack of transparency because you think it increases the likelihood of corruption, abuse, and cover ups of said things. Those are all good arguments to make. Saying that it's unscientific? Really really weak IMO.
Edited, Aug 17th 2015 5:16pm by gbaji