A man on a plane

Following the latest news of the attempt to blow up a Delta flight, and the reintroduction of debates about terror and security worldwide, I want to share some random thoughts this incident brought about.

The weakest link

A reliable source is one that provides you data and information you can use with little to no validation; a source you can trust as part of the group of sources you use to evaluate the riskiness of a specific situation. Be it a credit report from Experian, a Whitepages entry from Whitepages.com or a customer calling in to report, you need to know the possibility of your resource being compromised and the information you receive being mistaken or, much worse, maliciously injected by fraudsters. This is the basic malfunction that drives SQL injection attacks, if you don't sanitize DB entries you're most probably in for a big bad surprise. The weakest link – in this case, it seems to be Nigerian aviation security controls – has failed the whole chain. It may be improper screening, low budget security tools or just procedures not permeating through the system, but it let someone with malicious intent onboard and only luck failed him. The fact that Netherlands security just passed the stick on and let all passengers continue shows that the hand-over between security personnel in different airports might need some additional reinforcement, because terror is constantly looking for ways to inject itself in. There should be additional focus around determining the reliability of various airports as a reliable source of validated passengers and acting accordingly.

Lists don’t work

So his name was on a list. So what? Here’s what lists do: they make legitimate people’s lives harder (ever tried boarding a plane in domestic US with an Arab name or with a Middle Eastern passport? Enjoy the ride…) but much worse than that, they transform risk measures into binary checks (on the list? Stop. Not on the list? Carry on), a classic case of “searching under the streetlight”. So he WAS on the list but not under “really bad” but only under “naughty”? Come on. I have preached against black lists in the past (Hebrew only) and this is another case where, clearly, some old fashioned flight track analysis crossed with previous alerts could have made the trick. The data was there – it’s all a matter of interpretation.

Hindsight’s 20:20

I take off my shoes in remembrance of the shoe bomber; I don’t carry liquids in remembrance of the 2006 bomb-as-a-soft-drink plot; and I get sniffed by an automated sniffer every once in a while in a random US terminal. As far as I’m concerned, I should probably stop flying soon and leave air travel to terrorists and security, in an everlasting cat and mouse game. The most important thing about attacks that materialize (even if they fail) is learning from them. If all we get is another restriction, we are missing the point here. Every false positive and false negative (in any automated or manual decision making process) needs to serve as feedback to the system to improve on – in its ability to make better decisions, not in the restrictions it applies on the general population. Hopefully, the conclusions will not end up only bringing another top-dollar cutting-edge new machine to sniff people at airports, but will aid in making flying safer and easier for legitimate travelers while shutting it down for terror.

Where is my mind? Way out, in the water

(As I'm writing this, EA has announced it has bought PlayFish. All the more reason for a call to the industry to stop panicking and start taking responsibility for its own faith with big fish coming to play. But read on...)

One of the many highly useful skills I learned in Officers' course was artillery aiming. There was a lot more fun stuff I could imagine doing in any given afternoon, but there's definitely nothing like it. And when you just don't have an option (and believe me, in officers' course you don't have an option), you just give it your best shot. Pun intended.


So there I was, trying to get 155 mm cannon to hit a barrel. I don't know if you know how these things go, but artillery aiming is some simple arithmetic and a lot of art. You aim the cannon one way, then course correct the other, then again - in shrinking intervals, until you hit the target (or 50m away from it, which is considered good enough). It must have taken me 5 or 6 attempts to hit the goddamn thing - the gun crew was not a group of happy campers, nor was I. But all in all, it was a good drill, and I passed the test, and got my rank of deputy lieutenant, and mom was happy.

The EU is less united than expected

This mystery research, widely advertised today by the EU union's research department, puts cross border shopping declines inside Europe at 60%. I once wrote a post about 3rd world shoppers unable to shop, but this situation is a much graver one. Unfortunately, the pros' call to invest in better, more intelligent risk management to open up to international purchases goes unnoticed, while merchant insist on making lives harder for legitimate buyers.

Hopefully SEPA will help solve at least part of the issues dealt with here, at least giving a head start for merchants and buyers on their mutual trust issue.

Differential diagnosis, people!

House - "Haven't done the MUGA."
Wilson - "Then how do you know she needs a heart transplant?"
House - "Got my aura read today. Said someone close to me had a broken heart."
(Season 1)

Yes, I admit it, I'm an avid "House, MD" fan. The fun part about this show is that a lot of people find meaning that's beyond the plain action to relate to - much different, I assume, than what the writers meant. Some watch it for plain medical aspect, like a good mystery story; some treat House as their fictitious mentor; some like the twists of the tale. I sometimes watch it like a tale of business intelligence and a general case of decision making with partial information.

Here's how it usually goes: in comes a case. It either looks suspicious upfront or bad indicators come up immediately at the beginning (by the way, did you notice that in most of the first half of season 1, it was seizures?). Then they go through "Differential diagnosis" and run various tests; additional symptoms are discovered, and usually the truth is discovered by connecting details that hid from the doctors (because "everybody lies") or simply because they didn't connect the dots.

Yeah, real life medicine isn't that simple, and sometimes even knowing what happened is too complicated to be nailed down case by case. Obviously catharsis doesn't come, like clockwork, every 35 minutes - just in time for the drama. But it's pretty similar, isn't it? In comes buyer A, and presents the details of person B. Not much to say about buyer A - their IP connection (anonymized?), their email (opened yesterday?), purchase details, maybe shipping address. Nothing much on person B either - name, address, credit card number. Would you let the purchase go through? Differential diagnosis, people! What test can we run to verify this person, or establish fraudulent behavior? What does it mean if they can verify the email, answer a call to their mobile phone, tell you that the issuing bank is Citi? What additional indicators are we missing? Because that's what the "game" is - in comes a case - what do you do? No one is dying, but your balance sheet is going to look pretty bad.

The trick about decision making in this case is understanding what the next step is. Our goal, whether asking the customer for additional details or looking for an additional data source (what's next - Family history review? MRI? CT scan?), is to reach a conclusion in as little steps as possible, meaning that we need to be able to choose the steps that contain as much information as possible. BI experts sometimes tend to get as much data as possible, sometimes at enormous costs (these external vendors don't come cheap). House's department costs the hospital millions of dollars a year, but that's human lives. We need to be cost effective.

One major way to work with this is automated decision making systems - expert system - which help experts reach decisions by dealing with the quantity of data by using statistical models for classification. Advanced systems, when correctly fed with symptoms (or fraud indicators), can even suggest tests to rule out corner cases. Constructing such a system is the end station of the long road that starts with the single source of truth - in House's case, the doctor. In fact, expert systems in the field of medicine usually outscore doctors in identifying illnesses based on differential diagnosis - it only makes sense, when you hear House's staff shooting diagnoses based on remarkable memory and years of experience. Which brings out the question - why doesn't House use one? It would immensely scale his ability to save lives.

But then again, how much fun will that be?