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The Eyes Have It
Feelgood writes: "Yahoo is carrying a Reuters report that thermal imaging may be used in airports to detect liars. Shouldn't be a problem that 1 out of 4 liars will get away and 1 in 10 innocents will be incorrectly nailed." There's a UPI story about the lie detector possibilities and a blurb in Nature. From the UPI article, the inventor has a good appreciation of the ethical considerations. Will anyone else care?
...politicians around the globe should be subjected to lie detector tests at regular intervals :P
on the other hand, many moons ago i had done a few rather illegal things in airports. interestingly enough, those are some of the rare occasions i have been exceedingly calm in airports. in other words i would likely pass when i should fail, and fail when i should pass. what a stupid system.
likely this wont get implemented, but if it does i would imagine they would use still be wary of anyone who passes it, and take those who fail with a grain of salt.
flesh eating ants records
My buddy Ben Frankline summed this up the best: They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
I think history also will show that Ben Franklin never flew on an airplane. Ben Franklin also had quaite a bit to say about private property rights... and you don't have a right to get on someone else's airplane and they certainly have a right to demand you do certain things to board their airplane.
I say bring this stuff on... it makes a good first pass at passenger screening. Certainly better than "Are you carrying a bomb? Are you sure?"
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clear sign of a highly paranoid society.
It's not just a product of a paranoid society... in fact, I would go so far as to assert that your assessment is rather incorrect when speaking in generalities. Reality seems to suggest that the public's paranoia is directly linked to the intensity of the situation as portrayed by the news media. (The people are mostly "Amber Grain" and the media is the wind... and together, we get Amber waves of grain...)
The reality is that we live in an extremely LITIGIOUS society and if it can be shown that "they didn't do enough" to prevent this or that from happening, it makes one or several rich and happy widows/ers... not to mention rich and happy lawyers.
I believe that is where the ridiculous measures are coming from -- legal CYA activities, not paranoia or an interest in protecting public interest. Since WHEN has any corporate entity ever been interested in public good?
Show's what you know, they're worse then voodoo. ;)
People look at voodo and see a doll. they're familiar with dolls, and know its not possible.
People look at a polygrapgh and see needles and paper and wires all being run by some clown who's "certified".
I find it amazing that people still rely on them, when over and over again, in lab conditions there shown to:
a)be "defeatable" with little training.
b)the results can be interpetted diferently by different "professionals"
c)return false results(I was a victim of this once)
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Shouldn't be a problem that 1 out of 4 liars will get away and 1 in 10 innocents will be incorrectly nailed.
Most metal detectors probably let 1 out of 10 get away and incorrectly nail 1 out of 4. Hasn't stopped them from using it as one of many screening methods.
Result: 1,000,000 innocent people incorrectly tagged as "liars". 8 bombers correctly tagged as "liars". Even with an order of magnitude improvement in accuracy, 100,000 innocent (easy blushing) people, 10 bombers. Of course, if they just use it to pick out people to do a detailed x-ray/explosives inspection of the bags, then it might help, supplemented with additional random searches of course. Unfortunately, most airports don't have any bomb-detection equipment installed yet, so only a hand search by incompetent security is available.
Let's face it. To get real aircraft security is going to cost a hell of a lot of money. Current airport security is a joke. Poorly thought out rules being implemented by semi-trained personnel with the cheapest possible equipment. We can't incrementally improve the existing security structures and expect that to work. In the end, we're all going to have to pay for bomb-sniffing machines/dogs properly trained security personnel, and have the whole thing organized and tested (continuously). Then I think it would be possible to make getting a bomb on board a plane at least two orders of magnitude harder than it is now. Of course, I'm among the few that think that flying is still safer than driving to the airport.
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
Folks, let's calm down here before we get too rational. This method is only a "field test." What makes us think we will be prosecuted based on a blush? There would be further interrogation, testing, and harrassment (if it even goes that far) before charges were brought up on anyone using this method.
While I don't think this is very reliable; polygraphs give MUCH more "feedback" based on factors other than a blush, I don't believe this system is going to be used as a sure sign someone is guilty (especially with it's accuracy ratio).
void women (int money, time_t time);
Let's assume that one out of a million people is a terrorist and will lie when tested with the device. This means that in a group of a hundered million people, 100 liars exist.
If the device identifies a liar with 75% success rate, 75 out of the 100 liars will be found. On the other hand, if the device misidentifies 10% of the truth-tellers as liar, 9,999,990 out of the 99,999,900 truth-tellers will be misidentified.
Therefore, under these assumptions, if the devices indicates someone as a liar, the probability that he's actually lying is 75/(75+9,999,990), roughly 0.000749995%.
No, I don't know exactly how well some of these would work, but I figure if I can come up with more than 5 ideas off the top of my head in a few minutes, then how hard would it be for anyone seriously bent on beating this system to find and perfect a way of doing so?
Here goes:
1. Buy a thermal imaging camera of sufficient sensitivity so that you can see your own reactions, and learn how to modify them (feedback, negative or positive, does allow one to learn).
2. Know the questions being asked in advance. Practice giving rote answers to them so you're no longer thinking about the meaning of the question when it's actually asked, much like we no longer think about how exactly we tie our shoes.
3. Practice lying and learn not to give a damn about the fact that you're lying. In essence, practice becoming somewhat sociopathic. (Gee, shouldn't be too much of a stretch for a terrorist!)
4. If the expected answer is "no" (are you a known or suspected terrorist?), before answering, think of a question in your own mind to which the correct answer is no, and ask it of yourself before audibly answering "no".
5. Throw the baseline off before you even get close to the camera - get drunk enough to bring a flush to your entire skin but not so drunk that you are obviously impaired.
6. Like 5, get drunk, but don't stop at 'non-obvious'. Make it very obvious that flying scares the b'jeez out of you, and the only way you (especially after 9/11/2001!) and the only way you're getting on one now is if you're suitably numbed/happy.
7. Inhale a little powdered black pepper up the nose just before walking up to answer questions. The sneezing fit should throw off your reactions nicely. Blame it on allergies or a cold.
8. Take an emotion levelling drug before you get anywhere near the airport - the type that leave you not really caring about much. Surely you know a friend or two who has some psych-based drugs in their regimen of prescriptions...
9. Make like you have a toothache. Dig something sharp into your side through a pocket (a sliver of sharpened wood? A pencil?) to cause pain while being asked the questions such that your body's reactions are different.
10. Make like a person with a mild (or severe) disability, either mental or physical. Our social training has engrained that these people are "invisible", and that they CERTAINLY should not be unduly hassled, as that's cruel. An interesting physical choice might be "deaf mute", where you hand over a card asking the person to write what they want to say or ask on the small pad of paper you conveniently have with you. You write your answer as a response. So much for the instantaneous flush of heat from the eyes... You'll be looking down at a piece of paper, and will have time to "cool down".
Okay, not only five points, but ten. Much like physical locks only keep non-determined innocent people out of where you don't want them, this method will only catch nervous, embarassed, unprepared people, and thus is nothing more than the illusion of security. *sigh* It doesn't stop the really determined people, and those are the ones you wanted to catch, darn the luck.
Here are real stats.
In summary, accidents -- fatal and non-fatal -- are on the decline in the airline industry. There were six accidents for every 100,000 hours of flight time... and that includes all those piddling little one- and two-seater private craft.
Take a look at real aircraft, those that operate on schedule and carry more than a handful of people, and the rates are very impressive: 0.4 accidents for every 100,000 departures. (It is a little unnerving that the rates are on the increase, though!)
Finally, at the bottom of the last table, we see that there were only five suicide/bomb crashes during the eighteen years between 1982 and 2000. There were 147,577,440 departures. That's an attack rate of sweet fuck-all (0.00000339% for those that really need the number).
In short, there appears to be no real good excuse for spending a pile of money on increased security measures. The risk-cost factor just doesn't justify it. Yes, there should be better security measures; but, no, they shouldn't be costly.
IMO, YMMV, IDFM (I don't fly much).
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Remember, stress is a matter of the body, but a lie is a matter of the mind. They're correlated in many people, but by no means identical. Just think, do you know any smooth-talking liars (i.e. ones displaying minimal stress)?
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
However, if one sets off a metal detector, neither the security personnel nor the other people at the airport necessarily assume one is carrying a weapon. After all, it's a *metal* detector, not a weapon detector, and most everyone knows it. A so-called lie detector ostensibly tests for lying, though, and so security personnel and others at the airport may assume that setting it off means that one is lying, even if one isn't.
So why was my submission rejected?
2002-01-02 22:12:44 Eye Lie Detector (articles,news) (rejected)
Come on now, what is the criteria for accept/reject, how the reviewer feels? Don't you people TALK to each other??
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I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
Really? You preemptively agree that anything they do is ok? To take an extreme example, what about strip-searching all passengers? Rational people can and do disagree about which specific methods are reasonable, but handing a blank check to the authorities is never a good idea.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
Oh - and a further note:
There were 63 airline accidents resulting in fatalities in the years 1982 through 2000.
Compare that against the five bombings/suicides, and one thing is immediately obvious: reducing accidents by a mere 10% will have greater effect than eliminating terrorism.
Achieving the former is both possible and relatively cheap. Achieving the latter is impossible, and to even partially achieve the latter is terribly expensive.
Even more so, reducing automobile accidents by 1% would save more people than any amount of anti-terrorist measures.
Let's deal with reality: terrorism isn't much of a threat against American life and property when compared to things that we accept every damn day -- driving, smoking, eating Cheetos, and walking downstairs.
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"Shouldn't be a problem that 1 out of 4 liars will get away and 1 in 10 innocents will be incorrectly nailed."
/Dread
Irony too suble for non-techies, so just imagine:
In Amsterdam Schiphol Airport, a medium sized european airport, there are 450.000 annual flights in and out. Say each plain carries about 250 passengers. An even 1m passengers in/out a year.
In Amsterdam alone we are going to point to 300 misidentified Lyars per DAY.
What do we do with them? Slap em on the wrist? Make em write "I shall not lie" 1000 times?
Gr
Unless that person is you! Just think about it: With a plane with a 100 people on board, 10 will be incorrectly flagged as "liars", and what's worse, the person behind the desk who is going to decide whether or not to let you on board or have you put in front of a military tribunal and shot, will have no clue as to where to start. The only thing they have is that you blushed when asked a specific question. I bet you were just looking down her ..., you bastard! :-)
There is no way you can deal intelligently with all those false positives (contrary to a metall detector, where you can find out very fast exactly what caused the alarm).
Besides, take the scary option that they will actually record who were detected as liars, you'll get an incredible amount of data then to be cross-checked with a lot of other databases, and make a lot of people subject to criminal investigation wrongly.
Besides, I really doubt they will catch any terrorists this way. They only way you can achieve security against terrorists is to eliminate the desire to commit terror, and you can only do that by emphasizing human rights for everyone.
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