The Bigot List Leak Bench: The Clock and the Cases

THE BIGOT LIST LEAK BENCH · IN PLAIN SIGHT, CHAPTER 21
400 to 800 people read into a program kept since 1947, as a memo reports it; Wilson denies the meeting it records
Grimes's clock: each of N people leaks with chance p a year; L is the chance of at least one leak
p comes from three cases that came out: PRISM, Tuskegee, the FBI laboratory
the calibration, L*, who counts and the year are dials: every figure follows them
the model counts one kind of leak; whether anything in the chapter was one is not in it
run the clock · calibrate · read the map · count who knows · open the file

Evidence

fact ⇄ what kind of claim · live

The memo as In Plain Sight reports it: the people read into the program, the 'Bigot list', 'consisted of just 400-800 people', kept 'ever since the Roswell crash in 1947'; Wilson's June 2020 letter denying the meeting; the chapter's dates

chapter 21, pp. 260 to 273; the list's two ends are taken as given

REPORTED

Three secrets that came out: the NSA's PRISM program (Snowden, 2013), the Tuskegee study (Buxtun, 1972), the FBI laboratory's forensic testimony (Whitehurst, 1998)

as Grimes 2016 describes them; nothing added from outside the paper

DOCUMENTED

The paper's N and t for each case, its assumption of L = 0.5 when a case came out, Table 1's p, Table 4's limits, the March 2016 correction

the paper's own estimates, which it calls a best case for the secret; the bench reproduces every printed figure but one

REPORTED

L = 1 − e^(−t(1 − (1 − p)^N)), its inversion for p, the largest N under a threshold, the integral for a changing list

arithmetic on the paper's equations; nothing is fitted

EXACT

Which case sets p, the L* at which a case came out, who counts as knowing (the alumni form is the bench's), the tenure, the threshold, the year

choices, shown as dials; every finding is quoted across their range

MODELLED

Which calibration fits a program like this one, and whether the memo, or anything else in the chapter, was the model's leak

the questions this bench leaves to you

READING

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