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Homeland Security Department Testing "Pre-Crime" Detector
Posted by
timothy
on Tue Sep 23, 2008 12:02 PM
from the when-dowsing-meets-voight-kampff dept.
from the when-dowsing-meets-voight-kampff dept.
holy_calamity writes "New Scientist reports that the Department of Homeland Security recently tested something called Future Attribute Screening Technologies (FAST) — a battery of sensors that determine whether someone is a security threat from a distance. Sensors look at facial expressions, body heat and can measure pulse and breathing rate from a distance. In trials using 140 volunteers those told to act suspicious were detected with 'about 78% accuracy on mal-intent detection, and 80% on deception,' says a DHS spokesman."
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sensors... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sensors look at facial expressions, body heat and can measure pulse and breathing rate from a distance
...And most importantly, skin colour?
Seriously, is there anything a device like this can do that's either more useful or less invasive than a human watching people walking past and profiling/screening them on what they can see?
Re:sensors... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:sensors... (Score:5, Insightful)
Good point. A real terrorist doesn't show signs of distress, because he doesn't consider his actions immoral. He thinks killing IS the moral thing to do.
Parent
Re:sensors... (Score:5, Insightful)
The real problem with this is that the number of wrongdoers is small while the pool for false positives is high. If 5% of people have some intent that should be picked up by this, then 4% of all people with ill intent will be picked up. At the rate, then they'd have to have less than a 5% rate of false positives just to reach the point where half the people it says have ill intent actually do. What are the chances that it's going to have a false positive rate less than 5%?
And that's assuming that 1/20 people have some intent that would need to be picked up by this, while the actual rate is almost certainly smaller. Millions of people fly on airplanes every year, yet every year only a handful try something stupid. This is security theater at its finest.
Parent
Re:sensors... (Score:5, Insightful)
The real problem with this is that the number of wrongdoers is small while the pool for false positives is high. If 5% of people have some intent that should be picked up by this, then 4% of all people with ill intent will be picked up. At the rate, then they'd have to have less than a 5% rate of false positives just to reach the point where half the people it says have ill intent actually do. What are the chances that it's going to have a false positive rate less than 5%?
And that's assuming that 1/20 people have some intent that would need to be picked up by this, while the actual rate is almost certainly smaller. Millions of people fly on airplanes every year, yet every year only a handful try something stupid. This is security theater at its finest.
You've hit that on the head. About 200,000 people go through Chicago O'Hare, just that single (though large) airport, every day. And so far, zero terrorist attacks launched out of O'Hare. The odds that a person this machine flagged being an innocent is ridiculously high, even if it is has high specificity.
Also, aside from the raw statistics of the thing, there's another compounding factor that makes this even more useless*, which is it's rather simple for terrorists to game the system with dry runs.
Terrorist organizations already tend to use people not on our radar for attacks, so if they get pulled out of line on a dry-run, we won't have anything on them and it'll look like yet another false positive. Our young jihadi goes through the line with a bunch of his buddies, and everyone who gets pulled out of line doesn't go through the next time. Once you've discovered the group of people who aren't detected by the terrorist detector/profilers/crystal ball, the hot run can proceed with little fear of getting caught.
* For the stated goal, of course, not the goal of Security Theater for which a magical terrorist detector is great.
Parent
Re:sensors... (Score:5, Insightful)
The biggest problem with this, is between 78% and 80% of people told to act suspiciously can fool the system into believing they are intending to commit crime, logically those same people should be able to act in the opposite fashion to fool the system into believing they are not, I mean really, what are they thinking the logic of their analysis represents.
Apparently excuses for legal pre-emptive arrests for unsavoury people is the new focus, much like the no fly lists. A list of politically undesirable people who will be arrested, searched, interrogated, transferred to a prison facility whilst their identities are confirmed (which I am sure will take no longer than 24 to 48 hours). All this will be done at a range of designated choke points, like train and subway stations and, maybe even toll booths.
Adjust your political alignment or you will find you, your family, your friends subject to random humiliations, violent arrests, searches including sexual groping and destruction of private property, of course your will be released and it will all be done with a masquerade of legality. I believe some journalists have already experienced exactly this type of pre-emptive arrest at the RNC convention, I don't believe they were particularly impressed with the concept.
Parent
Re:sensors... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:sensors... (Score:5, Funny)
because they're usually bug-eyed, sweating, twitching, and frequently high
Based on that alone they would be catching a lot of nerds out on the first date too.
Parent
More bad statistics (Score:5, Insightful)
So this device was 80% successful at picking up suspicious activity from PEOPLE WHO WERE ASKED TO LOOK SUSPICIOUS.
Wow, amazing! Something any police officer who has served a couple of years would be able to do with 100% (or nearly so) accuracy.
What is missing is an assay of how many people it would flag if they were told to behave as if they were SCARED. You know... scared of being flagged for behaving abnormally, strip-searched, tortured, and never seeing their families again. Something tells me that the rate of false positives on this machine will overshadow the rate of false negatives by a very large margin.
Parent
Re:sensors... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sheesh! I've never seen a bunch of geeks so opposed to developing an immature technology before! Perhaps a toning down of the pessimism would be in order, and perhaps we may see some improvements in our understanding of human behaviour, and the programs built to understand it.
It isn't the idea of developing an immature technology that upsets people. It is our well-justified fear of the government deploying immature technology. I'd rather not be subjected to a public beta-test of a thoughtcrime detector.
Parent
Re:sensors... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's precisely the point of using an automated system instead of humans, to avoid accusations of racial or ethnic profiling.
Parent
Err (Score:5, Insightful)
My first thought, too... (Score:5, Insightful)
All we've got is a device which can spot normal people trying to be visibly "suspicious".
Parent
the end of liberty (Score:5, Insightful)
You are correct. From TFA:
It is absolutely ridiculous to think that they have produced any kind of test results that would indicate a functioning system. This is government and business at its absolute worst.
Not only is DHS trying their damnedest to become big brother, they are doing it in the most incompetent way possible.
This tech will never, ever work. All it can measure is physiological attributes. Correlation is not causation. Just because some percentage of people who are intending to commit a crime have certain physiological characteristics does not mean that anyone with those characteristics is a 'pre-criminal' and should be questioned. I weep for the future.
And even if, in some far-flung scenario, it did become functional it would still be illegal. It is invasion of privacy. Our thoughts and intentions are private. They mean nothing until we act on them. Human thought is vast and unlimited, part of our nature is boiling down the infinite array of ideas we have into action in the physical world where there are consequences. Everyone has the right to think whatever they want. When they act on it, then that action enters the territory of having (potentially bad) consequences.
What this evolves into is thought control and that is the end of liberty.
Parent
Re:Err (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Err (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, it does sound idiotic. My reaction was: ROFLcopter at the idea that you can successfully "tell people to act suspicious". Um, if it were possible in the first place for people to notice and control the aspects of themselves that make them look suspicious, others wouldn't be suspicious of those aspects in the first place!
Think about it: people become suspicious of others based on criteria X,Y,Z because meeting X,Y,Z reveals a higher probability of intent to cause harm. But anybody trying to cause harm will suppress any *controllable* sign that they are trying to cause harm before it's too late to stop. So the only remaining criteria people use in dermining whether they'll be suspicious of someone are those that are very difficult if not impossible to control. As a bad example: someone will only look around to see if he's being watched (which looks suspicious), if he's about to do something objectionable (like picking a lock). But he can't suppress that because then he takes the chance of someone noticing him picking the lock.
A better test would be to set up a scenario like a line at the airport where the screeners have to keep out dangerous items. Then, have a few of the participants try to smuggle items through, and get a huge reward if they succeed, while the screeners get the reward if smugglers don't succeed. Then, put a time limit on, so the screeners have to be judicious about who they check, so they only check the most suspicious. Oh, and make it double-blind as much as possible. Then, the people trying to smuggle will have the same incentive structure that real smugglers have, and thus will give off all the real-world signs of planning something objectionable.
But then, that would be too much work.
Parent
"Told to act suspicious"? (Score:5, Insightful)
The summary talks about the sujects being told to act suspicious. So, if you are told to be suspicious does this make any difference from someone who is actually planning something nasty? I suppose it is difficult to find subjects who are unaware they are being observed, and yet also intent on doing something bad. Nevertheless, I'd hypothesize there might be significant, observable differences between the two groups.
Not even close (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not even close (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
None of that matters - what's important is the false positive rate, ie. the proportion of people with no malicious intent who get flagged up. If it's as high as 1% the system will be pretty much unworkable.
Government screws private sector again. (Score:5, Funny)
Why do I even bother?
That's brilliant! (Score:5, Funny)
All you need to do now is post signs reminding any potential evil-doers to "act suspicious" and the system will work perfectly.
Fancy that, Burka's protect civil rights. (Score:5, Interesting)
If everyone was wearing a burka, then, there's no way that this system actually works. It may seem strange, but, what right does the public have to know my face?
Absurdities (Score:5, Insightful)
We lose more people to premature death each and every year because we have no health care than we have to terrorism in the whole of the 21st century.
fear, fear, fear, be afraid, fear, fear, be afraid.
A young girl waring a proto-board with blinking LEDs could have ben shot dead because of the hysteria.
fear, fear, fear, be afraid, fear, fear, be afraid. fear, fear, fear, be afraid, fear, fear, be afraid.
You can't say we have nothing to fear, but we have a lot of real and pressing things that need to be focused upon.
fear, fear, fear, be afraid, fear, fear, be afraid. fear, fear, fear, be afraid, fear, fear, be afraid. Threat level purple.
The U.S.A. has to re-grow our spine. We have nothing to fear but fear itself. Unfortunately, the current powers that be like to rule by exploiting and enhancing the terror of terrorists.
Re:Additional Locations (Score:5, Funny)
Parent