In the fall of 2024, Citizen Math released updated versions of every lesson in our library, plus a few new ones! We know you may have already prepped an earlier version or planned a repeat of last year, so we're continuing to make these earlier versions available through Thursday December 5, 2024.
You can find the new lessons through the regular search, and we hope you love them as much as we do. You can read more about these updates in Our Community.
Click here for the updated version of this lesson!
How accurate should government surveillance be? In 2013, it was revealed that the U.S. government was secretly monitoring its citizens’ phone calls and internet traffic through a program called PRISM. The goal was to identify potential threats and catch would-be terrorists.
In this lesson, students calculate conditional probabilities to determine the likelihood of false-positives and false-negatives, and discuss the tradeoffs between safety and accuracy.
