meta-roj

just to take a moment to consider the kind(s) of test(s) that would be done with this data…

U.S. Wants Personal Data on Airline Passengers, reuters, september 21, 2004

The U.S. government wants airlines to turn over information on more than a million people who traveled in June to test a new system for identifying passengers who may pose a security risk, officials said on Tuesday.

what’s the methodology here? the feds know there were terrorists on airplanes in june, and knows who they are, so they want to check the known terrorists against what the passenger-screening system finds by going through all the june data? someone with more software-testing experience than i needs to help explain this to me… what testing methodology needs real data but works without prior knowledge of the targets?