As I was reading Little Brother, there was actually a passage that made me stop reading and reread and think about it for a while. This really never happens to me so I figured it was something I should take note of. This was the passage that talked about the paradox of a false positive. What this means is that if you are testing for something very rare in a sample population, like terrorists or people who have contracted Super AIDS, as the book says, then the test accuracy must match the rarity of whatever the case you’re trying to look at. This reminded me of when we looked at the idea of data mining students to search for potential of suicide or mass shootings and the like. At the time, we simply talked about the ethics of looking into a students private data, but the efficiency and accuracy is a huge part of this too. Many college students at times will feel depressed or overwhelmed, and may search things that could potential be a red flag for the data mining for suicide. Similarly, I think a lot of people, myself included, are sometimes just curious about weird things that could seem like a red flag for mass violence, like how to make a bomb and stuff like that. If the schools took the time to look into all students that raised a red flag for suspicious behavior, they would be wasting so much of their time, and they could potentially miss real risks because of their focus on these non-risky individuals.