TSA's "Behavior Detection Officers" 281
Stanistani sends us to MSNBC for a dyspeptic Newsweek commentary on the TSA's latest attempt to make air travel safer: the rather ominously named "Behavior Detection Officers" now working in a dozen US airports, and slated to go nationwide in 2008. They are trained in the discipline of reading "micro-expressions." The editorialist calls that a pseudo-science, but in fact it's a well-understood skill that can be taught and learned. A cursory look at this TSA program might put one in mind of Orwell's "facecrime," and that's the road the Newsweek writer goes down. Yet some who bemoan the security theater historically run by the TSA point to the gold standard of airport security, Tel Aviv airport, and wonder why TSA officers can't act more like the Israelis. Bruce Schneier wrote recently about one reason why the Israeli security model isn't completely transplantable to these shores: scale. And here's Schneier's take on behavioral profiling from a year ago. That's what the BDOs will be trying for: scrutinizing intent instead of pocket knives. Let's just hope they don't get swamped with false positives.
Um, no. (Score:1, Informative)
The calmest and most collected persons (Score:2, Informative)
Sure, and thanks for asking. (Score:5, Informative)
I'm willing to assume you're not one of those fascist cunts and that you really are interested in the facts. In that case, this is the video I refer to:
Easiest Targets: The Israeli Policy of Strip Searching Women and Children
description:13-minute video: Five women - Palestinian, American, Muslim, Christian, and Jewish - tell stories of humiliation and harassment by Israeli border guards and airport security officials.
In fact, you will find testimoney by American Christians and Jews as well as Palestinians if you take the time to watch the video.
You can watch it at Google Video with the following link:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-69116100
In addition, you can download the torrent from www.onebigtorrent.org which was formerly known as chomskytorrents.org.
I would say enjoy the film, but it's not meant to be an enjoyable film.
Re:For a different take on this program... (Score:3, Informative)
First of all, these are not police, these are TSA officers. They work in airports, the article is about airports, and our discussion is about airports. It's not as if these people are walking around on every street, stopping and questioning whomever they please. Third, when you enter an airport, like it or not, you WILL be put under a greater level of scrutiny than in many other places. There aren't many other places where you're asked to discard you water bottle, take off your shoes, and have your bag X-rayed before you'll be let in. Finally, this appears to be a fairly new program, and the writer of TFA doesn't actually provide any instances of real people encountering problems with these officers.
If anyone's guilty of selective attention, it's the writer of the TFA, and you. I know it's popular /. groupthink to automatically lump any kind of government surveillance into the Orwellian category, but stop and think for a minute about all the reports of people who have been observed "acting erratically" before something bad happens. Oh, and there's the fact that, as my article shows, a man with a gun and bullets was stopped in the airport thanks to this kind of program, or a very similar one. I very much doubt that someone who looks like they're having a bad day isn't going to be allowed on a plane. If that happens, maybe the writer has a case. On the other hand, trying to avoid causing a scene at the airport has been good advice long before this program.
Re:Isn't this open to abuse? That is the delimma! (Score:1, Informative)
And even if you do sweat... (Score:3, Informative)
I visited Israel thrice. On the first visit everyone was searched — in a remote terminal in El Al's [wikipedia.org] exclusive use in a German transfer-point. It was rather annoyed by having to drag my checked-in luggage (which I planned not to see until Tel Aviv) and re-check it in again.
On the second flight, I went through a detailed search both ways — in and out of the country. Somehow these experts read my body-language as suspicious... First, at JFK, they took me to a special room, where they even took my shoes away for X-raying...
On the way back in Tel Aviv, I was also flagged, and the searchers' zeal went even further as they took a test-shot with my camera (to see, if it was real).
Only on the third flight, which was not by El Al did I escape the scrutiny. Either because Continental is not as paranoid (much to the annoyance of some of the Israelis on the flight), or because I was flying with my (very) significant other — a couple is always perceived to be of lower risk.
Now, here why I was not offended. First and foremost, because the Israeli searchers were always extremely polite, well-mannered, and respectful — unlike a typical TSA asshole. (I don't know, why that is. Maybe, because America's low unemployment forces TSA to hire and keep lower quality people...) When they asked for my shoes, for example, they pulled me a chair, so I would not have to stand on the floor bare-feet. After the search, one of them escorted me all the way to the plane chatting and apologizing continuously and handed me over to the stewardess (cutting the line of the boarding passengers), who apologized once more.
Or, maybe, because they weren't looking for bullshit like scissors and other implements, which no terrorist will ever use on a plane again, because it just would not work any more... Because now that we learned, that some hijackers may not be interested in ever landing the hijacked vessel — the passengers and crew will fight them head on (as they did the Shoe Bomber [wikipedia.org]).
Or, more likely, a combination of both factors.
Re:Sure, and thanks for asking. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Sounds a lot like what El Al does (Score:4, Informative)
In practice this method is not used, as someone intending to cheat could simply learn how to say these words properly.
But Ekman may not be right (Score:2, Informative)
Ekman's research is based primarily on the theoretical principle that facial emotional displays are an automatic, uncontrolled process -- in other words, that you smile reflexively because you're happy. In this paradigm, attempting to restrict the display of a facial display will produce a strange expression that'll be easily recognized as fake.
Obviously, that doesn't explain everything. Much to my chagrin, I actually do research in this messy field, and what we've found is that the Ekman approach isn't as good as one would think. One of the issues of Ekman's research is that it's typically done on staged photographs. When we use emotion raters trained on Ekman's Facial Action Coding System to judge the emotional displays in videos of real people making real displays, the inter-rater reliability falls through the floor. (It's even worse if you split off from Ekman's "basic emotion" categories, which are of dubious utility in the real world anyway.) It's not as bad as untrained raters, but it's still not great. This evidence suggests that there's something else going on besides an automatized process. Russell, another researcher in this field, purports an alternative explanation: that emotional displays are in many cases controlled social processes, and can't really be interpreted outside of a social context.
In any event, the parent is right. The claims on "micro-expressions" and Ekman's FACS in general are not nearly as defensible as their proponents in the TSA would like you to believe. From a signal detection standpoint, the problem isn't so much that you'll have misses, but that you'll have false alarms. More worrying, though, is our line of research shows that the miss and false alarm rates are in many ways a function of individual differences. In other words, some raters err more towards too many identifications (high FA rate), and others err towards too few (high miss rate).
As boring as it sounds, more research is needed before this is implemented -- "this" being any security measure based on Ekman's research.
Re:Okay, and? (Score:3, Informative)