There has been a great deal of controversy over the last several years regarding what types of surveillance are appropriate to p
revent terrorism. Suppose a surveillance system has a 99% chance of correctly identifying a future terrorist and a 99.9% chance of correctly identifying someone who is not a future terrorist. If there are 1000 future terrorists in a population of 300 million (300,000,000), and one of these 300 million is identified as a future terrorist, what is the probability that the person is actually a future terrorist?
