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"Hire paranoids, they may have a high false alarm rate, but they discover all the plots".

ROFLOL!!! Priceless....the real key is to place ones tongue firmly in cheek prior to paranoia.

Actually I don't think any here are paranoid but I think many have held onto the creative "what if" from their childhood...and that makes for even better and more accurate plot development. With all our life experiences, if we can help in surfacing anything for our country, we are happy to do so. Even the most obsure or oblique connection might be the one that is needed.

The point is that it's better to err on the side of caution, which means that one is bound to be wrong and overreact on occasion, but that is far better, than to ignore something and have that be the major disaster one should have paid attention to and averted.

Probability of false alarm is inversely proportional to the probability of detection. If you set the threashold too high, you are right more often, but you may miss a real event. When you set the threshold lower, you are bound to have more false alarms, i.e. be "wrong", but your probability of detection of a real event becomes much higher. This is the mode we need to operate in, because the consequence of one attack getting through can be catastrophic.