Replacing Metal Detectors With Brain Scans 327
Zordak writes "CNN has up a story about several Israeli firms that want to replace metal detectors at airports with biometric readings. For example, with funding from TSA and DHS, 'WeCU ([creepily] pronounced "We See You") Technologies, employs a combination of infra-red technology, remote sensors and imagers, and flashing of subliminal images, such as a photo of Osama bin Laden. Developers say the combination of these technologies can detect a person's reaction to certain stimuli by reading body temperature, heart rate and respiration — signals a terrorist unwittingly emits before he plans to commit an attack.' Sensors may be embedded in the carpet, seats, and check-in screens. The stated goal is to read a passenger's 'intention' in a manner that is 'more fair, more effective and less expensive' than traditional profiling. But not to worry! WeCU's CEO says, 'We don't want you to feel that you are being interrogated.' And you may get through security in 20 to 30 seconds."
cuz nobody has EVER been able to fool that (Score:5, Insightful)
wonderful piece of technology known as the polygraph before..... don't polygraphs also rely (in part) on body temperature, heart rate and respiration?
Testing (Score:1, Insightful)
What if your pissed because of a family call... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm pretty sure the airport can generate anger,fear, and frustration in most people.
How good can this really be?
Somethings wrong... (Score:5, Insightful)
What about someone who is carrying a weapon without their knowledge? That won't show up on the scans. I could see the supplement current screening technologies if it ever is deployed, but not replace them.
Let's not even start about false positives....
Thoughtcrimes (Score:4, Insightful)
Better not thing any doubleplus ungood thoughts, or have a friend that's Muslim.
I'm sure you don't.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Control (Score:5, Insightful)
And how did they devise a control for this?
AFAIK, there's no biometric scans of the 9/11 terrorists, so it's just like the company is guessing anyway. For all we know, terrorists could be the only completely calm people going through security, as they're the only ones not worried about arriving at their destination late.
This might not actually be so bad if it worked. (Score:5, Insightful)
I have no ill intentions, but I hate going anywhere unarmed. Maybe I could finally fly without having to give up my knife and sidearm.
Re:cuz nobody has EVER been able to fool that (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep. Also, depth of respiration, skin resistance, and blood pressure.
A good operator can usually tell if someone is deliberately trying to prevent them from establishing a baseline, but people with something to hide used to carry a thumbtack to poke their fingers with during questioning. It was supposed to allow them to concentrate on the pain instead of the questions, and prevent, or mask, the emotional/physical response that the machine could pick up. Then someone got caught and the operators would check for poke marks in the skin.
I guess one could concentrate on a mental image of Sarah Palin in a nipple bra to counter the Bin Laden image. Or, Dick Cheney as a Chippendale dancer.
Must...poke...out...mind's...eye....
Re:cuz nobody has EVER been able to fool that (Score:5, Insightful)
don't polygraphs also rely (in part) on body temperature, heart rate and respiration?
Polygraphs measure those things, but don't do much with the data. The main purpose of a polygraph is not to detect lies, but to intimidate the person being questioned. The idea is to trick the person into thinking that the polygraph is infallible and can determine when they are lying. This gives the interrogator another way to pressure the person into talking. (The person may incorrectly believe that the interrogator "already knows" or may reveal secrets because they feel that they no longer have any control--they don't feel culpable since they can't hide secrets from the machine.) Of course admitting that this is the purpose of a polygraph would undermine the tactic.
I'm guessing this new technology will be much the same: it won't actually work by measuring anything useful; but it may have a psychological effect that makes people easier to interrogate. This might be (marginally) useful for uncovering the occasional teenager smuggling pot, but I doubt it will do anything useful when it comes to terrorism. This quote is hilarious:
Developers say the combination of these technologies can detect a person's reaction to certain stimuli by reading body temperature, heart rate and respiration -- signals a terrorist unwittingly emits before he plans to commit an attack
For this to be true--for them to actually have calibrated their machine in a rigorous way, so that it can detect "terrorist intentions" with any kind of certainty--they would need to have tested it with a statistically-significant number of terrorists. Somehow I doubt their R&D facility has a few hundred terrorists in lockup (willing to lie and not lie on demand). I'm guessing their actual sample size was closer to zero. In other words they are just guessing that someone with "terrorist intentions" will exhibit similar physiological responses to someone who is nervous for other reasons.
Yet another worthless security measure being sold to worthless security organizations.
Farts (Score:1, Insightful)
Would these things detect that you're attempting to fart silently? Esp when you know that it will in all likelihood cause the person next to you chock to death? It could be considered a biological attack.
Re:Somethings wrong... (Score:5, Insightful)
Step A. Someone purposely handles explosives or better saturates their shins/shoes with a chemical that would set off the bomb detector.
Step B. Go to an airport and purposely brush by/touch people luggage.
Step C. Watch as airport grinds to a halt with massive numbers of false positives.
Even better spill some of this chemical in a doorway carpet so that lots of people would walk in every direction with it on their shoes.
How would an airport rationally handle something like this?
1. They could simply close the airport and wash every surface (I guess this would considered an physical DDOS)
2. Turn off the devices and go back to manually searching every article. (Slow but people would still get through)
3. Leave the devices on and just process all the people who come up positive. (Slow but people would still get through)
I'm not sure that an airport would have a really good way to combat this. I guess one way would be to put sniffer type devices discretely through the airport that you could use to map out the location of certain chemicals. Then set up the airport with doors that could be closed remotely so that when something like C4 is detected in some area you could seal the area, etc.
Re:cuz nobody has EVER been able to fool that (Score:1, Insightful)
Or a bunch of passengers beating the person into submission
Why stop at beating them into submission?
missing tag: securitytheatre (Score:4, Insightful)
EVERYBODY KNOWS that if some asshole tries ANYTHING on a plane, the only thing to do is for the passengers to immediately stomp the life out of the motherfucker, no ifs, no ands, no buts. Just take him apart.
EVERYBODY KNOWS that, including the terrorists. As a consequence, there is really no point to screening people at airports.
If people want to blow up a plane, it's a lot easier to book a flight, check your bags full of bombs that are hooked up to timers, and then let it rip. The security at the checkpoint is ludicrous, and the security for checked baggage is even worse. So, if you want to blow up a plane, it's not hard.
If you want to commadeer the plane a la 9/11, the passengers will take you out before you even get to the cabin. They know they have nothing to lose.
So, as a consequence, there is NO point in this idiotic security theatre. None whatsoever. And the smiling jackasses who come up with this Orwellian technology are vampiric leeches with their fingers up the butt of the reactionary militarists and an invertebrate Congress.
And all it means is that flying on an airplane is just that much more insulting and that much more irritating, and that much less worth the trouble.
RS
Re:cuz nobody has EVER been able to fool that (Score:4, Insightful)
Perfectly Safe World (Score:4, Insightful)
Are there really people out there who think we can achieve a perfectly safe world? Spending more and more money for ever smaller incremental gains in safety? Is the cost really worth it? Is giving up your rights really worth it?
At some point you have to stop and say look, there's an inherent danger in life. Your own body can turn against you. Are you willing to give up all your money and all your rights to feel safe? But what's left to be worth living if you've given everything up?
I cringe every time I hear about somebody dying in some unique way, because I know there are going to be laws that follow to ensure that never happens again. Unfortunately, those laws tend to be far more overreaching and subject to abuse in ways that are far beyond what incident initiated them.
People die. Dying is a part of life.
Re:cuz nobody has EVER been able to fool that (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a much bigger problem with bombs: They don't require informed consent.
See the case of Nizar Hindawi [wikipedia.org], who attempted to sneak a bomb on an El Al flight by tricking his pregnant girlfriend into taking it with her -- having her go through any intention scanner would show her to be completely trustworthy and innocent -- because she was. That's a problem that is exists for bombs, but not (easily) for guns. After all, it's not like you'd look in your carryon half-way through the flight, find a gun you didn't expect there, and go "OMG! Got to hijack the plane!"
Re:cuz nobody has EVER been able to fool that (Score:3, Insightful)
AC or not, the parent poster hits on a key issue. Flying nowadays has become a stressful enough situation. Trying to make a flight on time, trying to get through a security checkpoint that may have no one waiting, or a line out the wazoo (meaning a possible missed flight), hoping you remembered to take all the metal our of your pockets (change, keys, etc), wondering whether you will get that one airport security guy who insists that you cannot take your lighter with you (for your cigarettes) even though the TSA Rules clearly state you can, wondering whether you wasted a lot of money on "travel size" personal grooming stuff that may just happen to be either just a bit too large or in the wrong type container (regardless of what the sign at CVS/Rite-Aid/etc says), wondering whether everything is in the appropriate amount of zip-lock bags, wondering if you exceeded the total liquid quantities, wondering if with all the added security and screening your bags will actually be waiting for you when you get to your destination. And I am sure that only touches on a few factors.
Yeah... considering how stressful flying anywhere is nowadays, I dont see a lot of false positives... DUH!
This wonderful new method will probably report everyone who isn't a "flies all the time, every week" type of person as suspect. All while numerous "terrorist classes" who plan on blowing themselves up with whatever they are travelling on really wouldnt care too much about being caught - after all, they are ready, willing and prepared to throw away their lives.
What happens if I have high blood pressure? Or am a bit overweight (or drank a lot of coffee because I was up packing all night) and normally have an elevated heart rate? Or have an increased respiration rate because I've just been running all over the airport trying to find my gate while dragging a bunch of carry-ons?
Yeah, I am sure that a lot of this is designed to make people feel more comfortable flying, but (1) this one is so easy to punch holes in that I am sure the general populace will soon figure out how absurd a method this is, and (2) will in and of itself probably cause false positives by numerous people who are worried that their sprint to their gate may be the cause of a false positive, thus making the chances of such a lot more likely.
Brilliant waste of money.
Hmmm... maybe I should have posted this as an AC... but, whatever. I always wondered how many people on Slashdot get put on some sort of watch list simply for being just a little more intelligent and/or vocal than the general public...
Re:cuz nobody has EVER been able to fool that (Score:3, Insightful)
Why stop at beating them into submission?
Because some people are a bit more civilized than the those who would attempt kill random strangers?
Re:cuz nobody has EVER been able to fool that (Score:2, Insightful)
thinking of false positives: Actually let's do... (Score:1, Insightful)
From the submitted story text... ...detect a person's reaction to certain stimuli by reading body temperature, heart rate and respiration â" signals a terrorist unwittingly emits before he plans to commit an attack...
And nervous ordinary folk who have fear of flying, but must fly to somewhere anyway because of job/family/whatever, don't exhibit these very same kinds of physiological responses???
Especially when these days we add fear of terrorist hijackings and security gestapos in airports on top of their already being afraid to fly in the first place.
OMFG (Score:5, Insightful)
That's it... if there was any question about where that "too far" mark may be, we can be sure they have gone well beyond that point.
Now they can screen for all sorts of things... "gay"? "pedophile"? Who else can we decide to hate and persecute?
If all this stuff could potentially save my son's life, I still say NO!!
Pause for a moment to let the gravity of that sink in. Now go back and realize that there is more chance of a drunk driver killing him than a "terrorist." Regardless of which may happen, it will always feel tragic and there is no way to effectively protect ourselves from everything. This crap has got to stop.
They would if... (Score:1, Insightful)
Do you believe that your average flyer today has the courage and determination to go up against a determined person wanting to damage or bring down the aircraft?
They would if everyone who boarded an airliner was issued a Louisville Slugger baseball bat as they entered the front door of the airplane and by law had to hold it for the entire duration of the flight. This would work as a wonderful deterrent for anyone who otherwise would be an obnoxious passenger. Everyone would be very polite to one another.
Re:cuz nobody has EVER been able to fool that (Score:3, Insightful)
If the person being tested doesn't know if he is lying then what is the point of taking the polygraph!