F-91W in Afghanistan, on a guy with a beard = terrorist.
F-91W in a coffee shop on a guy with a iPad = hipster d-bag.

It’s funny how often products are used as a “taste performance” to declare affiliation with a particular group or cause, yet the moment that performance is ill received, the same people who obsessively document their every purchase for the adoration and appreciation of their chosen audience are all “YEW CAN’T KNOW ME! AH CONTAIN MULTITUDES!” No, you’re not a beautiful and unique snowflake. And neither are the terrorists. It’s a subculture like any other, and it and its social signaling mechanisms and even fads, and can be documented just like the rest.

Not just F91W, but other Casio watches.

Meanwhile, should we trust these internal reports? I suppose the burden of proof to complain about all this should be on me to find a credible statement that someone was jailed only because of his watch. But even without that, even assuming there were other good reasons to jail and disappear these people, is it even good circumstantial evidence that they should be jailed? Would a DA or judge accept this circumstantial evidence to arrest someone in the US? Maybe these specific models are incredibly rare in Afghanistan, but it’s hard to tell for sure without knowing that. Hard to believe without hearing that.

Then find their CSRT tribunal reports to see what they were suspected of. You won’t find any that only say they were caught wearing a Casio watch.

In response to all the watch nay-sayers

What a letdown…

After that statement, I was waiting for you to say you joined al-Qaida after getting your watch. Like getting the Casio F-91W pushed you over the edge into terrorism or something.

But you’re missing one big thing: No one was ever sent to Gitmo solely because they happened to be wearing a watch.

webmonkees@3:32: Wouldn’t worry. They’l be first against the wall when the revolution comes, anyway.

What percentage of people sporting a Casio F-91W are in fact Al Qaeda types with bomb-making skills?

Its the second question that’s important when you’re “profiling”. Unfortunately, there are millions and millions of these watches, and maybe a couple thousand Al Qaeda types with bomb-making skills. That means that 1 in 10,000 (more likely 1 in 100,000 or 1 in a million) people who wear a watch like this are actual Al Qaeda types with bomb-making skills. Which makes this little factoid useless for identifying them. Even though its arguably less offensive in some ways, its statistically even worse than using “muslim”, “has a beard”, or “not white” as “signs” of terrorist intent. These are all in the same category of logical fallacy.

Unfortunately, people doing the profiling (or random-Joe) will focus on the 1st statement, and not the second question. The most likely interpretation is that 1/3 of the people wearing these watches are Al Qaeda types. Which is off by so much, “its not even wrong”. Don’t laugh – by emphasizing this first point, you fell victim to this yourself. As did the DHS by emphasizing it in their report.

I ask instead, what WON’T some DA or judge accept, especially if it’s to protect us from the terrorwrists?

It doesn’t matter that 1/3 of people captured have these watches. It matters what percentage of people who have the watch (anywhere) are terrorists.

I’m willing to bet that close to 100% of the people captured had 2 legs, but that isn’t strong evidence that they have terrorist training from Al Qaeda.

It wouldn’t matter if every single Al Qaeda trained person had this damn watch—unless you know that it is very rare among the non-Al Qaeda populace, it doesn’t help AT ALL in selecting people who might be allied to Al Qaeda (although if 100% of them had it, then you could at least release everybody who lacked one).

If professional military intelligence is this incompetent (or willing to be this imprecise), then the mind boggles not only at how many innocent people are abused, but how many really, really bad people are certainly ignored if anyone uses this level of stupidity for investigations.

http://www.michaelyon-online.com/dead-taliban-in-chora.htm

I bought one from amazon for 8 euros, what a ripoff

I started wearing an F-91W after it was profiled on Cool Tools: http://boingboing.net/2010/12/03/casio-f91w-wrist-wat.html I love it.

Hmmm, so maybe it isn’t the watch that causes alarm; it’s the fact that Boing Boing profiled and recommended it?

So those of you that bought these dildos that Cory highly recommended? You’d better WATCH IT.

I , i am sparticus !

Suppose, in your area of operations:
There are a billion men
Casio sold a million F-91W watches
There are a thousand Al-Qaeda
One-third of Al-Qaeda members wear Casio F-91W watches

Let C mean wears a Casio F-91W
Let Q mean member of Al-Qaeda

Prob. of wearing a Casio P(C) = 10E6 / 10E9 = .001
Prob. of being Al-Qaeda P(Q) = 10E3 / 10E9 = .000001
Prob. of wearing a Casio, given that you’re AQ is P(C|Q) = .333

You randomly stop a guy on the street and he’s wearing an F-91W. What’s the probability he’s Al-Qaeda?

From Bayes theorem:
P(Q|C) = P(Q) * P(C|Q) / P(C) = .000001 * .333 / .001 = .000333

That’s a one-in-three thousand chance. Too low a probability to be any use, right? So this watch business is a waste of time, right?

Not if there are other circumstances. Suppose you have a guy that you didn’t just pull randomly off the street. Say that you see someone remote-detonate a bomb, and he runs off into a cafe. When you arrive there are 10 guys there, all claiming innocence. No one else entered or left, so there must be 9 bystanders and one Al-Qaeda member. Every one of them has a 10% chance of being an Al-Qaeda member, but that’s not good enough to arrest anyone.

However, one of them is wearing a Casio F-91W watch. What’s the probability he’s Al-Qaeda? In this group:

P(Q) = 0.1
P(C) = 0.9 * .001 + 0.1 * .333 = .0342 (Combined probability of 90% at the population probability of .001 and 10% at the AQ probability of .333)

P(C|Q) = P(Q) * P(C|Q) / P(C) = .1 * .333 / .0342 = .97

A 97% estimate of someone’s guilt is a lot better than a 10% estimate!

By itself, data points like the Casio watch don’t make good screeners, but in combination with other information they can make a HUGE difference, if you can do a little bit of math.

Think I’ll pick another up next time I’m at Walmart.