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NASA Plan to Read Brainwaves at Airports 369

Posted by timothy from the hope-they-have-a-chagrin-setting dept.
cascino writes: "In one of the more bizarre (and intrusive) spinoffs of the Government's 'crackdown on terrorism,' Officials of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration have told Northwest Airlines security specialists that the agency is developing brain-monitoring devices in cooperation with a commercial firm, which it did not identify. Space technology would be adapted to receive and analyze brain-wave and heartbeat patterns, then feed that data into computerized programs 'to detect passengers who potentially might pose a threat,' according to briefing documents obtained by The Washington Times." This is the second story recently that gives me second thoughts about flying Northwest.
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NASA Plan to Read Brainwaves at Airports More

NASA Plan to Read Brainwaves at Airports

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  • obligatory: (Score:5, Funny)

    by llamalicious ( 448215 ) on Saturday August 17, 2002 @11:29AM (#4089065) Journal
    It's actually time to break out the tinfoil hat!

    • A note about tinfoil hats (Score:5, Funny)

      by Skiboo ( 306467 ) on Saturday August 17, 2002 @11:44AM (#4089143) Homepage
      It can't be stressed enough how important it is to have the shiny side pointing out. This is needed because the shiny side is most reflective to psychotronic radiation, while the dull side can actually, in certain environmental conditions, absorb it.

      However, it is also wise to complement this with a layer of foil pointing shiny side in. This will keep your brain waves, which are also reflected by the shiny side, from being picked up by mind-reading equipment.

      There is a small number of aluminum foil researchers who believe that this may cause an alpha-wave harmonic to build up in the skull resulting in memory loss or pseudo- religious visions, but their findings have never been replicated by the aluminum foil research community at large. Even if their findings are validated, the risk involved is small compared to the potential of mind-intrusion.

      -- AFDB [zapatopi.net]
    • Emf Protective clothing, including hats, etc can be seen here:

      http://www.lessemf.com/personal.html

      http://www.rfsafe.com/rfclothing.htm

      http://www.nspworldwide.com/

      and some industrial stuff

      http://euclidgarment.com/KWGARD.html

      There is plenty info out there if you search for RF protective or emf protective clothing.

      I like the RF Safe Baseball Caps myself.

    • It's actually time to break out the tinfoil hat!

      For which head?

  • great idea (Score:5, Insightful)

    by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Saturday August 17, 2002 @11:30AM (#4089070) Journal
    ...to test brainwaves, because it's obvious that normal travelers (being delayed by extensive security measures) are never stressed-out or homocidal. Especially if they're made to stop for one more scan by minimum wage federal employees that aren't doing jack squat ANYway.

    GREAT IDEA. I feel safer already.
    • You're right, this will really help. Now, not only can they search her (at all three airports on the way here this year) but they can tell if SHE'S THINIKING EVIL THINGS! This should prevent 67 year old women from commandeering aircraft, and NASA should be applauded for thier fine work. Now they just need a machine that works on lawyers... you know, the guys that sue the airlines when the middle eastern bomber guy gets searched.

  • Aim this device at the gate employees (Score:3, Funny)

    by Snar Bloot ( 324250 ) on Saturday August 17, 2002 @11:31AM (#4089074)
    Maybe we'll finally get proof that when Northwest claims "mechanical troubles", what they really mean is "We don't have enough people on this flight so we're just going to blow off that ticket we sold you."

  • now i feel safe... (Score:3, Flamebait)

    by bsDaemon ( 87307 ) on Saturday August 17, 2002 @11:33AM (#4089081)
    i guess if i say "lets firebomb the capitol", i'm a seditionist, but now if i think "god, airport security sucks" i'm a potential terrorist...don't i have a reasonable expectation of privacy in my own god damned skull?

  • inflight... (Score:5, Funny)

    by skydude_20 ( 307538 ) on Saturday August 17, 2002 @11:33AM (#4089084) Journal
    used on the planes:

    Pilot: Could a Mr. Smith please stop thinking about our stewardess'. It's frightening them.

  • In the year 2101

    Security officer 1: What he thinking...
    Security officer 2: I think he's thinking..."Someone set us up the bomb!"
    Security officer 1: We get brain signal!
    Security officer 2: We better not let him on the plane...
  • the same people whose $160,000,000 space probes split in two when their rockets fire.

  • Hello, Dubya, got anything going on in there? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Their first test subject was George W. Bush. At first they thought it didn't work.
  • So, you get a machine that can identify everyone who is angry, upset, nervous or paranoid and you send in the rent-a-cops! Oh, lovely.

    I'd actually like to see this deployed for the humor value, except that it would probably cause a lot of borderline paranoid psychotics to melt down... :-(

  • One Word... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by aero6dof ( 415422 ) <aero6dof@yahoo.com> on Saturday August 17, 2002 @11:36AM (#4089096) Homepage
    thoughtcrime
    • ...and then there are people like me -- writers -- who might be imagining hijack scenarios as potential plot devices. What about us? What about an air marshall or other undercover law enforcement type trying to think up every possible move a hijacked might make?

      We're not terrorists, but we might be trying to *think* like terrorists. If we succeed too well, we're in trouble, aren't we?

      - Robin

  • WHOA! Stop right there... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by HaeMaker ( 221642 ) on Saturday August 17, 2002 @11:36AM (#4089097) Homepage
    This is where we need a very quick temporary restraining order and get this nipped in the bud right now.

    There is NO WAY users of an airport have to submit to a passive medical scan prior to borading a plane.

    Even under an expected diminished privacy defense, this isn't even close to legal.
  • ... Nope -- not April 1st. Not even close ...

    Hmmmm ...

  • One for the Road (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ysbfd ( 565887 ) on Saturday August 17, 2002 @11:38AM (#4089105)
    If the US government was really interested in airline safety they would require Breathalyzers for every pilot.

  • i wonder (Score:2, Informative)

    by pohl ( 872 )
    How will such a system distinguish between someone with terroristic thoughts and someone who merely experiences a lot of anxiety from being in the middle of large crowds of people? Will those poor souls be delayed and harassed every time they travel? It would be a pity.

  • metal plates (Score:2, Interesting)

    by hereward_Cooper ( 520836 )
    so now all people with metal plates in their heads are terrorists...

    -- Coops
  • I suppose NASA will call this machine of theirs Cerebro. Where is Magneto and his psychic sheilded helmet when we need him? I'll take two.
  • Maybe they could equip the flight attendants with these things so actually show up when I want another !@#$ing soda.

  • EM Effects (Score:2, Interesting)

    by HaeMaker ( 221642 )
    With metal detectors, geiger counters, bomb sniffing equipment, brain and heart rate scanners, not to mention the radar, radios, cell phones, computers, flourecent lighting, etc.

    How long will it be before all of the EM radiation converges and produces some kind of secondary effect, say like a worm hole or quantum singularity, or maybe fusion?
    • All the EM radiation could converge and produce a secondary effect, but it's just as likely that all the EM radiation will converge and do absolutely nothing.

      Saying that it would cause a wormhole or quantum singularity is like saying "We don't know what else is in the universe besides us, so it must be aliens."
  • if we're all wore wearable computers and your brainwaves could be emmited over 2.4 GHz humans could essentially be "telepathic" right? haha

    Or better yet, everyone could wear IR transmitters and transmit the data themselves instead of having the brain-wave sensors all over the place, just have one per person.

    Then you'd have to be in direct line of sight to read each other's minds.
  • I thought NASA was the space agency. You know, charged with making space shuttles fly missions into outer space. I had no idea NASA was analogous to NSA, the national security agency.

  • I'd love to hear people's thoughts on how this is (or isn't) different from the standard x-ray and metal detector rigamarole. Seems like many of the complaints one could register against this approach would also apply to the already existing intrus^H^H^H^H^H^Hsecurity measures.

  • Don't hold your breath on this one... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by irishkev ( 457679 ) on Saturday August 17, 2002 @11:51AM (#4089182) Homepage

    There's good news and bad news. The bad news is that the government is making an active attempt to read peoples' minds. The good news is that it's never going to work---if the description in this article is any indication of how they're going to go about it.

    How could I possibly know it's not going to work? Well, let's just say I worked for a company that burned up millions of dollars attempting to do something FAR less ambitious than these bozos at NASA have set out to do. We were using essentially the same techniques as described in the article, with one incredible difference. THE NASA THING IS NOT GOING TO TOUCH YOU. BAA HAAA HAAAAA! I nearly broke a rib when I read they're going to gather the EEG signals---I have to steady myself from laughing so hard as I type---without placing a "cap" on the subject. Wait, can you hear that? It's the sound of my former co-workers laughing their asses off. What is the NASA team going to do *I'm still chuckling*, have every airline passenger step inside a Faraday cage [gla.ac.uk] packed with room temperature, superconductive sensors built by little gnomes at Area 51!?

    We've been there, we've tried this....well, minus the full body Faraday cage and extraterrestrial sensors. That is, we had the luxury of actually using a standard EEG headset to collect the data. And it was still difficult to JUST GET QUALITY DATA. EEG is the biggest pain in the ass to work with. Ask ANYONE who's ever dealt with it.

    Well, say NASA can wave a magic wand and somehow collect the data, then what? Predict high order human behaviors and thought processes by analyzing EEG with some other special herbs and spices thrown in for good measure? It may sound good on paper, but I'm here to tell ya: It's bullsh*t. No, it's double bullsh*t. Two years and millions of dollars later, I'll tell you what we got: Snake Eyes. Nothing. Jack. Nil. And I can assure you that we weren't going for anything remotely as hard as this NASA thing. We had lots of PhDs, freaks, nerds, experts, etc. It didn't matter. The feds would have a better chance of getting at the intent of an individual if they would let a circus macaque run loose in the terminal, randomly identifying "terrorists" in the crowd!

    In case you think I'm kidding about all of this, that's me in the pictures. Pic1 [cryptogon.com] Pic2 [cryptogon.com] Pic3 [cryptogon.com]

    • Yeah, of course it won't work. I'd guessed that myself, though I guess for you it isn't just a guess. :)

      But...

      The feds would have a better chance of getting at the intent of an individual if they would let a circus macaque run loose in the terminal, randomly identifying "terrorists" in the crowd!

      I don't know whether to say "Don't give them any ideas" or "I hope they go for it so this whole security initiative can be revealed for the stupid farce that it is". Instead I'm just going to say -- I hope they do it because it'd be god damn hilarious. :)
    • Well, the EEG aspect of it may not work. But unless I was seriously misreading the article, that was only one component. They're also gathering data on eye and facial movement, heart rate, all kinds of junk other than EEG readings.

      I'm not normally much of a conspiracy theorist, but maybe the EEG thing is thrown in there so that people can laugh off the "mind reading" aspect of it as being unfeasible and dismiss the whole thing while they get 90% of the program working without anyone noticing.

      I'm still concerned about my privacy, and being falsely accused of being a terrorist jsut because I'm a bit high strung that day.

      • In my opinion, for the application that they're shooting for, the EEG seems like the only chance of accomplishing the goal. And EEG is totally lacking. So what are they going to do!? Add the Colonel's Special Herbs and Spices: heart rate, eye movement, blah blah. No way. They do talk up EEG, though. For example, in the article, there's this sentence, which seems like, hey, these bozos can do something with EEG: Published scientific reports show NASA researcher Alan Pope, at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., produced a system to alert pilots or astronauts who daydream or "zone out" for as few as five seconds.

        Alpha patterns, guys. Alpha waves are probably the cleanest pattern in EEG. (Someone correct me if I'm wrong.) Easily quantifiable. As soon as you start to relax/zone out your brain starts giving off alpha. When they would hook me up to the machine and put the goggles on, I'd hear the engineers talking about how they could see clear alpha showing up. Now, is the pilot/astronaut thinking about his wife, the vacation he's going to take, if he turned off the oven, etc.??? No combination of EEG, heart rate, eye movement, is going to help you out there. However, the machine would be able to show if the subject went from being in a "zoned out" state to doing multiplication. Think of EEG as a gross indicator of very general phenomena.

        I have to admit, though, when I first got involved with this stuff, I had these visions of Brainstorm-like machines (Christopher Walken, 1983), with the capability of recording and playing back thoughts. HA! But then you look at a few channels of EEG going across a laptop screen. Those data are so many orders of magnitude removed from what we're actually perceiving that it's ridiculous that EEG is even being considered for the role in question. It's comedy. Heart rate, eye movements??? They might as well throw in the movement of the Dow 30 and the S&P 500 while they're at it. Tea leaves, entrails, take your pick. I did initially suggest the circus macaque, so I'll be sticking with that. ;)
    • > The feds would have a better chance of getting at the intent of an individual if they would let a circus macaque run loose in the terminal, randomly identifying "terrorists" in the crowd!

      1) You haven't been to an airport lately, have you? They're already doing the circus macaque thing!

      I mean, just who do you think's confiscating G.I. Joe dolls and Medals of Honor while making lactating mothers guzzle a gallon of h00terj00ce as the price of admission for the "privilege" of flying the friendly skies?

      Then again, anything that means less babies on airplanes gives at least some relief for the poor fuckers who still have to fly rather than drive. I wouldn't know. I love a good road trip, and my "I'll drive, rather than fly" limit for a one-day drive is about 16-20 hours - about 1000-1200 miles, which is way more than enough for anything my job will ever require.

      <RANT> I mean, think about it. Fuck the airlines, gimme an air-conditioned automobile with a big cushy seat all to myself, an open road, a fresh box of Krispy Kremes, a six-pack of Jolt Cola, a line-out-to-tape adapter, six speakers, and a laptop crammed with MP3s of my favorite road music! Fuck the airlines! All the baggage I can cram into the trunk! Your choice of good eats at any restaurant in any city en route! Door-to-door service from home to hotel! No lineups, no waiting! I say again, Fuck the airlines!

      You hear me, Chapter-11-bound United! FUCK YOU! You heard my, South-drunken-pilots-West! FUCK YOU! You heard me, Chapter-11-fried US Air! FUCK YOU! You can all rot in bankruptcy for all I care!

      You hear that, airlines? We don't need you anymore! We don't need you, we don't need your shitty service, your lying gate agents, your lost baggage, your delayed flights! We don't need to watch TSA goonz feeling up our wives/girlfriends/daughters! And most of all, when we drive, we don't need to worry about still being blown to smithereens because you imbeciles JUST. DIDN'T. GET. IT. when it came to security.. We don't need you anymore. So please, airlines, just dry up and fly away. Fuck you and the Pegasi you flew in on. </RANT>

      (Whew, OK, rant over.)

      2) Based on my comment in #1, it appears as though I've just been sued on behalf of all nonhuman primate species by the Circus Macaque Anti-Defamation League, for my derogatory comments against macaques.

  • I can see the court cases now.

    Sexual harassment charge: "You were harbouring lewd thoughts about the air hostess, don't try to deny it!"

    Air rage charge: "Ok so you claim you were only THINKING about throttling that kid in the row behind you, tough luck, throttling is throttling"

    Seditious thoughts charge "So you were delayed at checkin, that doesn't give you the right to think the security controls are crap"
  • Didn't Arnold got a body scan at the airport? He then took his head off and tossed it to the guards where it blew up.

    Great, now we're going to have terrorist's heads blowing up. Airport security will then start checking hats AND shoes. Doh!

    LoB

  • Next Customer... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by skydude_20 ( 307538 ) on Saturday August 17, 2002 @11:53AM (#4089195) Journal
    RIAA/MPAA of course!!

    You there! STOP! We are sueing you for thinking of a copyrighted song, as you have the potential to duplicated it within your mind or sing it to someone, thus resulting in us lossing millions!

  • Thought Police Inc. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Alan ( 347 ) <arcterexNO@SPAMufies.org> on Saturday August 17, 2002 @11:54AM (#4089198) Homepage
    Wow, all I can say to that is "can you get any more blatently big brotherish than this?" A lot of the 1984-esque things that have been going on lately have been similar to BB and nazi germany (report your friends etc), but suddenly they are proposing a literal thought police?

    *shaking head*

    Wow
  • This technology is useless. Half the people in the airport are going to light up for one reason or another.

  • AN EEG IS NOT READING YOUR MIND!!! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Picass0 ( 147474 ) on Saturday August 17, 2002 @11:57AM (#4089215) Homepage Journal
    It's is soooo misleading the way this story is being headlined everywhere today.

    An electroencephalogram (EEG) is not capable knowing what images or thoughts are in your head. An EEG can only measure electrical activity and create a graph of that activity. Think of the output of a heart monitor - a line goes up and down in time to the heart's beating. Now think of a couple dozen lines that represent the electrical spikes in major nodes of the brain.

    An EEG can detect abnormal brain activity as a result of disease, head trauma, or seazure. It cannot tell me if you are an asshole.

    This idea is a red herring. I think the fear it creates is more useful to law enforcement than the actual tool itself. The output of an EEG is not very useful in a court of law.
    • And once we're all used to getting EEG'ed, we'll all sit by and watch as they slowly get more powerful and more accurate over the next 30 years until they basically ARE reading your thoughts with some high degree of effectiveness. (And of course they will demand to stick a cap on your head as soon as they find out it won't work without it.)

      We need to stop this, preferably sooner rather then later. The brain must be held as sacrosanct [m-w.com], or we'll really going to regret letting this go.

      Another trading freedom for illusory security story again.

      What, you don't want your mind read? You must be a terrorist. Your citizenship is revoked. HAND.

    • IAABS (I Am A Brain Scientist) (Score:5, Insightful)

      by NoData ( 9132 ) <_NoData_@nOspAM.yahoo.com> on Saturday August 17, 2002 @12:46PM (#4089433)
      Of course you are correct.

      To suggest we have any technology today that can infer a person's thoughts is ludicrous. Even at a coarser level, to suggest that a momentary detection of brainwaves can be reliably correlated with some "bank" of known EEG signatures which indicates the disposition or identity of the subject is fantasy.

      The weakness and noisiness of scalp potentials cannot be overstated. The devices we use in our lab are state of the art, but even these require a sophisticated multi-electrode cap, each electrode carefully primed with an electrolytic gel, and fed into an extremely sensitive amplifier, while the subject sits in a completely electrically isolated room (basically, a glorified Faraday cage).

      And even when *all that* goes well, the data you collect is extremely noisy due to the inherrent conflation of *billions* of neurons all contributing to the recorded potentials. The solution is multi-event averaging. We give subjects 100s of trials, and only after tedious signal processing and averaging can we extract the gross electrical activity associated with a particular cognitive act ("event related potential").

      And to suggest that we (cognitive scientists) have some sort of repertoire of electrical signatures mapped to "thought patterns" is preposterous. The best is the suggestion that particular waveforms are associated with "orienting" or "error-making" or "perception" or "novelty." Most serious scientists work hard to localize these signatures to particular brain structures (a whole industry unto itself) rather than wonder if these tiny effects can tell us about a person's hidden agenda.

      Much has been made in the popular press about a particular waveform called the P300...a characteristic "positive-going" wave occurring around "300" milliseconds post stimulus onset. This waveform has been associated with attending to a novel stimulus. Some people have suggested using this waveform as a sort of ERP "lie-detector" using the following flawed thinking: If you show a suspect scenes from a crime, if they are novel (new to the suspect), they'll elicit a P300. If they are not surprising (indicated by a *lack* of P300), then the guy's seen the scene before and is guilty. I won't even begin to address all the problems with this "guilt by failure to disconfirm" approach...I'm sure you all are bright enough to see the logical holes, much less the technical and cogntive-theoretical problems.

      Anyway...no, some guy passing through a gate, and some gee-wizardry fingering him as a terrorist-like baddy? Only in Ashcroft's wet dreams for now.

      • The other thing that the press is not going to make clear is that an EEG is only a tool, and a DOCTOR must then enter that process and make a determination of the patient's health. Airports are not going to find people with the skills to conduct and read an EEG who will work for burger-flipping wages.

        Airport EEGs would be more expensive than the bomb sniifing machines, the see-thru-your-clothes machines, and all of the other crazy ideas that will kill off air travel.

        EEGs can help determine brain damage or death. The press is going to make this sound like a TV that shows pictures of what's in your head.

        And perhaps that's the real goal here - to make the under-educated third world believe that terrorism will be more difficult, if not impossible. After all, the Americans can now read minds. The idea is the most powerful thing here. This doesn't have to work, it only has to make people THINK that it works.
  • Doesn't this sound like what is described in George Orwell's 1984? The big brother is observing what you're thinking... sounds scary to me...
  • IIRC, the Washington Times is a rather biased, right-wing paper owned by the Unification Church. Or used to be, anyway. Anyone have recent data?

  • This is too difficult to do (Score:4, Informative)

    by Avumede ( 111087 ) on Saturday August 17, 2002 @12:03PM (#4089249) Homepage
    From having worked with EEG's before, both on the recording end, and the analyzing end, I can tell you it is amazingly difficult.

    We were doing something that would get much better results anything they can do in airports, which is fitting an cap of about 30 electrodes on the head, and meticulously calibrating them so they are in good contact with the scalp. It requires a special gel to get good conductivity.

    Even so, the data was very difficult to analyze. There is a low signal to noise ratio. In our case we didn't have a lot of outside electrical noise, but there just is a lot going on inside a persons head. And different people have different EEG's, some very strong, others weak and hard to analyze. Analysis frequently requires advanced techniques such as wave decomposition (I'm forgetting the real term for this, though).

    What this is about is signal detection. My personal view is that the signal to noise ratio will be incredibly low, making this detection fairly useless. Either there will be too many false alarms, or not enough hits. So i wouldn't start worrying yet.

  • Second Thoughts!? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by theGopher ( 459423 )
    I don't think this would give me second thoughts about flying Northwest... it seems as though Northwest is trying to position itself as "the secure airline"... a strategy that I'm surprised no airline has really tried to use since the terrorist attacks. (Sure, you can take Foo Airways, where the only security scan is a newly minted federal employee staring at the women on the x-ray cam, but wouldn't you prefer to take Bar Airways where they interview each passenger rigorously, require biometric ID and scan aganinst federal fingerprint databases before issuing a ticket, check branwave scans etc... I think it has marketing potential.)

    Whether these measures are effective or not is questionable, and I would agree if this became federally mandated it would be invasive, but this seems to be a private initiative so far and thus not much to worry about.
  • > This is the second story recently that gives me second thoughts about flying Northwest.
    Fact: Every singly time (yes, literally, every time) I have flown with NorthWest, they have managed to send my luggage somewhere other than my destination. I don't need anything else to give me second thoughts about flying with them...
  • Why is it we can spend billions of dollars on the latest and greatest in high-tech airport technology...

    ...and we pay the people using it $5.75 an hour?

  • Who needs to scan brainwaves? (Score:4, Funny)

    by wirelessbuzzers ( 552513 ) on Saturday August 17, 2002 @12:18PM (#4089303)
    Everyone knows that you can tell if someone is a criminal by the pattern of bumps on their skull.....
  • This is the second story recently that gives me second thoughts about flying Northwest.

    First, the article *I* read never said that Northwest was behind this plan, only that a proposal was *made* to Northwest. Sheesh.

    But on a side note, if there were studies out there that could indicated that this work really could potentially catch people who posed threats, I'd be the first to get on a Northwest plane. I don't, after all, have a problem with people passing my body through various screening methods, and I don't have a problem with people looking at the contents of my luggage.
  • The last time I linked to the Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie [zapatopi.net]. Well, who's laughing now? ;-)


  • This is the second story recently that gives me second thoughts about flying Northwest.

    Exactly !
    Someone ought to investigate how the new, post-911, dragonian security measures are affecting the number of people that won't fly.

    If they are reading brain-waves and penalising people based on those readings, shouldn't it be called thought-crime ?

    • Wow, now that is a cool idea!

      Now this is a security measure that I can deal with.

      One Tiamat [nemonox.com] at every terminal!

      All terrorists will be engulfed in Hell-flames forged in the belly of the guardian dragon located at the Delta counter at terminal C.

  • To this kind of brain-wave invasion:

    Professor Chaos! [southparkstudios.com]

  • It could be that this new "technology" doesn't exist at all. It's probably just a deception that will justify selective ethnic profiling. "Gee, walk through this gate. It will read your brainwaves and heartbeat. Don't be afraid, it's harmless and non-intrusive. We can't actually read your thoughts, but we can get a pretty good idea of your state of mind and intentions from your physiological data." translates into walk through this gate with the pretty blinking lights, and we will pull you aside, run background checks all the way back to your great grandparents, interrogate you anyway we see fit, and if we find anything, you win a FREE all expenses paid vacation to Cuba.

    To bluff the system, just wrap a wet towel around your head, or if you're wearing a turban, dunk your head quickly in and out of a toilet.
  • "All the graphs are showing a big middle finger.."

  • Devil’s Advocate (Score:3, Interesting)

    by DumbSwede ( 521261 ) <slashdotbin@hotmail.com> on Saturday August 17, 2002 @12:49PM (#4089452) Homepage Journal
    Devil's Advocate

    The September 11th terrorists engaged all sorts of nervous, suspicious behavior, and security guards didn't notice, or felt in inappropriate to subject them to further scrutiny (yes, yes, they let them get through with box cutters when they shouldn't, yadda, yadda).

    Is it appropriate or inappropriate for a human to make the call for further scrutiny based on nervous and suspicious behavior? If it is appropriate, then why is it bad for machines to detect suspicious and nervous behavior in these situations? Despite the reference to "Mind Reading", the technology, whether based on reading brainwaves or other physiologic responses, is really only looking for signs of heightened agitation. Yes there will be false positive (especially at introduction of these technologies), but why are these false positives inherently worse, than false positives by alert security officers detecting suspicious behavior?

    For arguments sake, lets assume a 100% accuracy rate in detecting stress or agitation. Should nervous or agitated people be allowed to fly without some attempt to ascertain the source of their agitation?

    Now they may have a personal reason they don't wish to divulge.
    "I'm afraid of flying"
    "I just got a divorce"
    "I'm moving to a new job"
    "I'm afraid of being asked why I'm afraid"

    They should just be informed they can/should respond:
    "Yes I am feeling some degree of stress for personal reasons."

    Many may be surprised to learn they are giving off signs of being stressed, which may of benefit for them to be aware of.

    Gun toting terrorists are likely respond with the majority in saying:
    "Yes I am feeling some degree of stress for personal reasons"
    But they would still have shown up to security screens as requiring extra attention.

    While such automated scrutiny is likely to stress some people, especially at introduction, it could potentially make airport checking much quicker for the majority, and even for the minority, since their additional screening occurs immediately, instead of in line with everyone.

    I agree there should be checks and balances for the use of such technologies. They are not appropriate for all areas, but to reject them outright in all situations is probably short sighted. Many things in life are a compromise from the ideal. The ideal freedom would be to board all planes with no screening, and having them fall from the sky in some percentage due to terrorism, which would just be the price we pay for complete privacy and freedom. I'm sure x-ray screening technologies were initially seen by some as too intrusive. As threat scales up, so must our technological intervention.

    False positives must be assumed to occur, and those people that need further screening must be handled in such a way as not to stigmatize them, stress them further, or alarm other passengers. Even without this technology, near strip searches in front of other boarding passengers fails this requirement.

    BTW, I would rather respond to why this would be bad, if the technology works, rather than why it won't work, which in all truth may not work well enough now, but can probably be made to work well enough in the future.

    Let my pillorying begin at the hands of /. Freedom Fighers. :-)

  • ...tin-foil hat!!!!

    They ain't gonna steal *MY* brainwaves!!!

    It would be interesting to know how they will tell the difference between terrorists and angry people... Oh I know, the ones about to die for Allah are at peace and the others are just unhappy people because of the cramped seats.

  • Something smells like horsecrap (Score:5, Interesting)

    by guttentag ( 313541 ) on Saturday August 17, 2002 @01:05PM (#4089520) Journal
    1. The Washington Times is not a real newspaper. It is a publication of the Rev. Sun Moon's Unification Church [religioustolerance.org] that was founded in the 1980s to advance church interests by influencing people who would mistake the publication for the Washington equivalent of The New York Times.

      You should see the stories they ran during the Clinton administration... one front page I remember staring out of the newsbox at me as I walked up the Metro steps one day featured a giant photo of kids dancing around a bonfire at a rave. The headline on that story criticized Clinton for not supporting an "anti-drug" bill, but the article said nothing about the fact that he was opposed to the non-drug-related things that were tacked onto the bill.

      The publication survives for two reasons:

      1. Church funding
      2. A decent sports section (not news)

    2. The Washington Times did not obtain these documents from the government; EPIC did.
      The organization [the Electronic Privacy Information Center] obtained documents July 31, the product of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Transportation Security Administration, and offered the documents to this newspaper.
      The EPIC story [epic.org] plays down the brain-reading aspect by devoting only one sentence to it:
      NASA has even suggested developing "non-invasive neuro-electric sensors" or brain scans at the security gate to see if people are having suspicious thoughts.
    3. Neither organization which claims to have these documents provides them or quotes more than one out-of-context sentence fragment from them. Normally when an organization obtains government documents through FOIA, it provides the focuments themselves as proof. Anything obtained through FOIA is public record. If EPIC took the trouble to show us its FOIA request [epic.org] in PDF format, why isn't it showing us the documents it claims were obtained?
    Conclusions:
    1. Washington Times readers are by nature a paranoid, ultra-conservative group that likes to feel informed of the stories the real media "conveniently ignores." (Aside from the people who pick up the paper and throw out everything but the sports sections... and I've seen people do this on the Metro)
    2. Any Washington Times story should be carefully scrutinized before treated as news.
    • The Washington Times is a "real newspaper". Many people dismiss it because of its owner/publisher. It's funny that they don't apply the same standard to other newspapers that are owned or founded by eccentric people with political agendas. That would disqualify many of today's "respectable" newspapers.

      • Re:Washington Times (Score:3, Interesting)

        by guttentag ( 313541 )
        Washington Times stories routinely cite reports generated by political action committees as the basis for its stories. Those reports are written because special interest groups paid their authors to produce reports that appear to support their the special interest groups' positions. That is the first reason The Washington Times is not a real newspaper. In this respect, it is more of a glorified business journal.

        Second, real newspapers do not exist for the purpose of promoting their owners' beliefs. Real newspapers have a strict separation between the editors and the publishers.

        Sun Moon himself says [unification.net] he created The Washington Times so he could influence the world:

        "Do you know that I was creating the Washington Times during the court case? ... Do you know how much the Washington Times spent? 830 million. ... Why? I gave everything, centered on true love. So it expands everyday. So that I could affect the depth of American thinking, filling it full of true love water. Completely full, occupying everything."
        The court case he refers to is regarding charges of tax evasion. He was convicted and spent over a year in prison.

        He also claims he used The Washington Times [unification.net] to bring Reagan and Bush to power to defeat Communism:

        The Unification Church, centering on Reverend Moon, came to America to connect that victorious foundation with the American government, the presidential level. ... Reagan became the president in 1980 through me. Think about it. Five years after the Vietnam War, a conservative, moral, rightwing Reagan could become the President of the United States. Who made that? Reverend Moon. During my time in Danbury jail, in 1984, I helped Reagan too. He was my enemy. Bush, too. I chose those great American leaders, centering on the Unification Church as subject, with the American government as object-connected into one. The Washington Times helped America overcome the communist world.
        Moon claims he used The Washington Times [unification.net] to influence Congress (yawn):
        Father [Moon] was in prison, but at that time said Nicaragua must not be abandoned, the Freedom Fighters must be supported. US Congress abandoned the project, they didn't want to give any money to the Freedom Fighters. So the Washington Times made a special editorial on the front page. You never see front page editorials, but it was published. Many people sent money and letters to Congress and the Senate. The leaders were shaken and knew they had to pass the resolution for support that had already been sent to the trash can. They decided that instead of fourteen million dollars, they would send twenty seven million. That is the money that Father earned for the Freedom Fighters of Nicaragua.
        Bo Hi Pak, publisher of the WashTimes, claims Moon used The Washington Times to promote Star Wars [unification.net] (SDI -- double yawn):
        Through The Washington Times and other organizations he founded, Rev. Moon staunchly supported President Reagan's proposed Strategic Defense Initiative, also known as "Star Wars," to protect the United States from Soviet nuclear missiles through space-based defense.
        I'm getting tired of looking up instances in which the owner or publisher of The Washington Times states that Rev. Moon used the publication to extend his influence over the world, so I'm going to go take a nap now. If you still want to believe the WashTimes is a real newspaper, well, it's your loss.
    • 1. Washington Times readers are by nature a paranoid, ultra-conservative group that likes to feel informed of the stories the real media "conveniently ignores."

      This says a lot about ./ readers (and editors) as well. I'm no longer surprised when I read a hair-raising story like this on Slash, then buried in a comment someone debunks it. I guess even geeks are attracted to sensationalism.

  • See, the problem with things like these is not that they might work, the problem is that they probably don't work. And because they don't work, a lot of people will get hassled and bothered that really have done nothing wrong.

    This kind of voodoo isn't new to the legal system: fingerprints, graphology, fiber analysis, and lie detectors are all suspicious to some degree because they have not been evaluated with the kind of scientific rigor that is necessary. Similarly, DNA tests, where we have a good scientific basis for knowing how reliable they are, are often not carried out with scientific rigor by forensic labs (e.g., the DNA tests during OJ's trial were ridiculously sloppy).

    But, you see, the people we elect as our representatives usually are lawyers and administrators, and they have no clue about truth or evidence. When some previously successful entrepreneur, or someone with a big name, or someone who can talk fancy, tells them something, they believe it and pay lots of money for it. Scientists and engineers to them are just more talking heads who can't be very smart because otherwise they wouldn't be satisfied with being scientists and engineers.

  • The founder of Infoseek has been off on this loony scheme for a while. You can find more information here [theregister.co.uk]. He has probably been able to sweet-talk his way into more government support; he already had contacts with the FBI. Never mind that there is no published, peer reviewed scientific evidence that this works.

    Note that the problem isn't necesssarily with the "brain wave measurements" themselves--it's plausible that you might be able to determine familiarity of a picture from such measurements to some degree of reliability. The problem is that it is completely unclear how reliable any such measurement would be for finding actual terrorists. For example, after you have seen a set of images once during one screening, you will remember them. Next time, they will be familiar (people remember even images that they have seen very briefly basically forever).

    Any scheme for identifying terrorists has to have a very low false positive rate because the consequences of misidentification are so serious. Establishing a low false positive rate requires not only extensive testing, but also just a lot of experience with a new technology.

  • "Stop that man! He copied the Spiderman movie without paying!"
  • Aluminum foil hats reach record high in sales!
  • Because their users will be thinking about:

    Crashing (potential suicide bomber/hijacker)

    Killing (playing too much Q3/UT2002)

    Bad thoughts in general (Windows users at anytime the system does a random reboot)...
  • ..isn't there a name for that? Anyway, I wonder if that's what's going on. They tell you that they can read your brainwaves, so anyone who has something to hide (and doesn't know how ludicrous this claim is) will immediately become nervous, thus changing their behaviour enough that security personnel will notice.

  • They wouldn't have to do this if they simply divided the plane into "Terrorist" and "Non-Terrorist" sections.

    "Sir, you can't light up your sneakers in this section. I am sorry, but you are going to have to move to the Terrorist section if you want to continue."
  • Airports would become like supermarkets.

    With five-dollar-an-hour security checkpoint employees operating the scanning equipment, I have to assume that every now and then one of them would screw up the voltage and fry the brain of a passenger who is walking through. The first few times this would shock the other passengers, but eventually we'd accept it as the price of secure air travel and we'd get used to hearing:

    Cleanup in aisle seven.
    Followed by the collective groan of the travelers in aisle seven who are faced with a choice between jumping onto the end of another line or waiting for "Irv from cleanup" to arrive.
  • Officials of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration have told Northwest Airlines security specialists that the agency is developing brain-monitoring devices in cooperation with a commercial firm, which it did not identify.
    It turns out that the commercial firm in question is none other than this! [mlb.com] Just look at their URL if you need proof:

    http://mlb.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/mlb/homepage/mlb_h om epage.jsp

    That explains how this shadowy organization is able to launch its satelites. This conspiracy has, of course, been thoroughly documented. [episodelist.com]
  • with (100/2/6)% accuracy.

    you have "sex" on your mind.

    (2 for males being half the population and 6 for well the every six second thing.. so sex is on your mind 1/6th the time.)

    and NASA is getting funded for that??!!
  • They're probably just checking for alpha, beta, delta, and theta waves.
    Alpha - (8 to 13 Hz) Indicative of Relaxed, Awake State
    Beta - (14 to 30 Hz) Fast, Unsynchronized Activity
    Delta - (0.1 to 3Hz) Indicates Deep Sleep Highly Synchronized Brain Activity
    Theta - (4 to 7 Hz) Slower Activity, Found in Sleep

    They might combine them with heartbeat, breathing, eye, and electrical signals and feed it into an expert system or neural net to identify people that are unusually nervous.

    In the future they'll hide incriminating images and voices all around you and check your EEG's for "P300 waves." If your brain recognizes too many of them, it'll increase the chances of you being a suspect. John Norseen, a scientist with Lockheed Martin, is often able to discern when subjects are thinking of particular numbers. He predicts that by 2005, brain mappers will be able to automatically scan the skulls of everyone going through airports to search for potential hijackers.
    The Lie Detector That Scans Your Brain [nytimes.com]

    They'll also have probability assessments of people instead of a definite guilty or innocent. Those with a higher probability of guilt will get more agency attention.

    Eventually they'll know what you're thinking. They can already wire a computer to a cat's brain and create videos of what the animal was seeing. [bbc.co.uk]

    All that's left is to reverse the process and plant ideas into your head.

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