By Jan Radtke

I met the guy in my favourite bar, sitting, no cowering in my favourite seat. Just a regular Joe, maybe 40, already losing his hair, skinny, staring through thick glasses into an empty glass.

Now, I’m normally a friendly guy, but that day I had had it. I am with the FBI and we were still cleaning up the mess from five days ago, when Homeland Security thought a computer would be better at identifying suspects than a human being. And the computer was better. So much better that everybody whose name sounded even slightly Muslim, who had entered a mosque, who bought more fertilizer than you would need for a flowerpot, or who was not born American, and had been traveling through any airport where terrorists had reportedly travelled in the past, was now a suspect. A suspect to be rounded up and interrogated. Within seconds after some idiot in Homeland Security activating the program, the number of suspects in the system to be apprehended rose from the normal 100,000 -150,000 to more than a million, and climbing. It took another idiot nearly one hour to make the decision to stop the fucking computer. At that time we had exactly 65,239,211 suspects in the system. And we would have had more, if the system hadn’t slowed down to an extent where you could see the data dropping bit by bit.

Did I mention that I’m normally a friendly guy? But not that day—this guy presented the ideal opportunity to vent some of my frustration.

‘Hey, that’s my seat,’ I said, looming over him in my best threatening-interrogator pose and voice. I started counting, but I reached eight before a response came.

‘What?’ his voice was barely audible, filled with resignation. The kind of resignation where you immediately know, there is nothing you could do to this guy to bring him down any further. It got worse when he looked up. Big tired eyes behind thick glasses, without hope. Shit! How could you be angry with such a loser?

So I ended up with buying him another beer, and another, and another, until he had told me the whole story. It took some time for him to start talking, and I should have walked out the moment he told me that he worked at Homeland Security.

‘I’m working in the IS department, leading the Early Suspect Identification and Apprehension Program—the ESIAP project.’

I stared at him: This guy? He had started all the trouble?

‘The software wasn’t too bad, we did test runs with mock data and the recognition rate was already as good as those of most police officers. Which, by the way, is not too difficult,’ he explained, becoming a little more energetic now he was speaking about what was clearly his favourite topic. ‘It’s an intelligent agent, meaning it can do quite a bit of analysis, can improve itself and can learn from successes and mistakes. It is not really intelligent in the human sense, more like an idiot savant. Very good at one thing, completely useless at everything else and not one shred of common sense.’

‘Another few months and we would have started limited pilots in three cities. But then this stupid President was elected. The first thing he did was to put his stupid friends into positions of power—you’ve heard about the new head of Homeland Security?’

‘Yeah, I read about him,’ I responded. That guy was indeed an idiot and had caused quite a bit of noise in the FBI too.

‘So the new President and his combination of populism and incompetence instructed his buddy, the Head of Homeland Security, to raise the bar. And raise the bar he did. Soooo clever this guy, soooo clever.’ He mumbled, losing the thread after what was probably one beer too many.

‘So what did he do?’ I started to get curious.

‘Simple, he asked for the parameters we use to describe a suspect. So you get 3 out of ten points if you’re a Mexican, 6 if you’re an Arab. If you’ve been sentenced for anything, you get another 4 points, and so on. So if in total your points exceeded a certain threshold, the software declared you a suspect and automatically sent a message to whatever police department was closest to the home or last known location to get hold of the guy.’ As he explained, his voice got clearer, obviously fueled by a deep anger.

‘Okay—so what’s the problem?’ I wondered. So far it seemed to make sense.

‘The problem is, that the idiot set the threshold at 5. So everybody above a level of 5 became a dangerous suspect, to be apprehended immediately. Within seconds, basically every bloody American, and everybody in the rest of the world became a suspect. We never did do the calculation, but there are probably only 6 or 7 million Americans who would stay below that threshold. The oldest of them being 4 years old.’

‘So it should have been easy to delete all the new suspects from the system?’ I asked.

‘You’re right, it should have been. Were it not for the fact that at the exact same time another system went live: Data Quality Assurance and Anti Tampering Security Agent—DQAATSA. It was also an intelligent agent, pretty good at its specific task but stupid at everything else. The purpose of that system was to make it virtually impossible to delete data in the system. It made it impossible too, to change the parameters of our system.’

He smiled tiredly.

‘You see, we were very clever. One system creating a mess and the other system taking care that nobody would stop it, so it could continue to create an even bigger mess. With human stupidity and the speed of computers you can do wonderful things.’

He went on to tell me the rest of the story. In the end they had to literally pull the plug. Without electricity, computers are just metal boxes. But then there were emergency power supplies, and the computer system declared the technicians as probable terrorists—why else would they want to sabotage it? The police who arrived only knew what the system had told them. The system was not evil, it was just thorough, and not limited by common sense.

‘Eventually they’ll shut the system down, but all existing databases with suspects will go down with it,’ he mused. ‘That will be a good time for terrorists. Fortunately, I don’t think they activated the other program.’

‘Which other program?’ I asked.

‘The Suspect Location Identification and Elimination Program—SLIEP, with I and E, not EE. Another intelligent agent. It identifies high-risk suspects for immediate elimination. Who are then taken out by drone-launched missiles.’

Because I had had a few beers my thinking was a bit slow and frazzled. Suspect. Parameter. Threshold. I had been in Iran, Yemen and Syria in the last year. I fly a lot and most of the international airports I use have been frequented by known terrorists before. My brother is married to a Muslim woman, a modern woman but Muslim nevertheless. I am sniper certified and own two very good rifles, registered of course. What would my rating be? Definitely more than 6 …

‘What about the FBI?’ I asked, panic in my voice. It took some time for him to answer. You could almost see his thought process in slow motion: confusion, understanding, processing, concern.

‘Law enforcement—yes … excluded. But then included again. To be on the safe side,’ he mumbled, almost asleep now.

Through the fog of my beer-addled brain I heard something. A low hum coming my way, to my bar, to me…

Who was the loser now? Intelligent agents – my ass!