Slashdot Mirror
Airport Security vs. Cyborg Steve Mann
CompaniaHill writes: "The New York Times (free reg, etc.) has a story on University of Toronto engineering-professor-turned-cyborg Steve Mann's recent run-in with humorless airport security. Apparently his preplanning and documents were sufficient to get him through the Toronto airport security on his way to St. John's in Newfoundland, but not sufficient to get him through the St. John's airport security on his way home. Two days later, after strip-searches, forced removal of implants and x-raying and other ill-handling of delicate hardware, he returned home in a wheelchair. Mann's lawyer is attempting to recover the cost of the $56,800 in damaged hardware, while his doctors are studying his body's response to the removal of the implants, some of which he has had for over twenty years."
my god! what good are cyborgs if they can't even contend with simple airport security officers?
darth vader would be ashamed!
Just raise the taxes on crack.
Wow, I can totally cripple someone far more learned than me _and_ make seven dollars an hour! Woo-hoo!
Seriously, though, next time, take another route home. Zeppelin or something.
--saint
if anyone read my post a week ago, airport security is simply retarded. they decide they are going to nail someone and they do just that.
me and my girlfriend had to wait for 2 minutes while they chemical tested all of luggage and carry ons, and shoes and purses for explosives. this was because her shoes (complete with metal shoe lace ends) set off the metal detector.
later in the trip tourists are posing with the reserve offices for pictures... i saw this many times. tourists have their arms inches away from machine guns carried by 5 foot tall women and all the airport cares about are my stinky shoes.
then the kicker is the woman on the airplane knitting with HUGE knitting needles.
this guys sensor that opens doors is going to do about as much damage as my stinky shoe. yes, when i fly i want to be safe, and that is why i defend the 'fly naked' campaign.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
In a related story, Britney Spears announced that she would never perform in Canada again.
That they destroyed his equipment and pulled off is electrodes was wrong, and they should be held accountable for this. No airport security agent should ever be unprofessional like that (which is why I support the federalization program currently in progress in the US). But the guy had to be inspected.
sulli
RTFJ.
This is *not* Kevin Warwick, the British psuedoscience jackass who's been walking around for a few years with an RFID pet tag under his skin.
It is Professor Steve Mann (http://eyetap.org/mann/), one of the first inventors of a *real* wearable, and a downright cool guy. I didn't know he had any implants- does anyone have any more information? I'd imagine his equipment would be a bit more advanced than the snake-oil Warwick's been showing around.
Jeeez........ do I have to spell it out?
Darth: [waving his hand] I'm not the Sith Lord you're looking for.
Guard 1: This isn't the Sith Lord we're looking for
Guard 2: Move along.... move along......
Two years ago Steve Mann had a very similar run-in with AirCanada, they being very hostile towards him bringing his equipment on-board, and damaging some of his equipment in the process.
His detailed description with photos is at Air Canada Irresponsibility.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
In one fell swoop they cut him off from his augmented memory and processing, and then threw his visual system for a loop, hence the need for a wheelchair.
I'm a graduate student at the University of Toronto, and interact with Prof. Mann on an intermittent basis (did a project under him a few years back, meet him in the lab whenever I'm borrowing his soldering equipment).
He can see fine without his HUD. It's not a complete visual transformation overlay - it's a wearable computer display, functionally equivalent to most of the other wearable displays you can buy. He's been working on information-overlay projects for years, many of them successful, but to say that he has "vital" vision-enhancement programs running at all times is a drastic overstatement.
Likewise, "augmented memory" consists of him either teleconferencing with someone or doing a Google lookup. He's perfectly capable of finding his way through this university, or an airport, without augmentation.
Use common sense, people. If he was disoriented, I'd suspect it to be the result of a many-hour delay with inadequate food/water or of an overly-zealous search as opposed to loss of any electronics.
I do - if you've followed his research, you'd know that his glasses continually project data streams onto his eyes.
(example - he walks up to a price display at a store twiddles with his fingers, and sees, projected into his vision, the price of the same object at the competing store.)
If he's worn such glasses for a long period of time, and if he's doing some other sorts of tricks with prisms and mirrors to allow the merging of eyeball-data with bitstream-data before it hits his retina, the loss of the glasses could very well hamper his ability to navigate on foot.
(I'm reminded of an old experiment in depth perception where they gave subjects glasses with prisms that shifted their "vision" 30 degrees to the right. The first day, everyone was bumping into the left-hand side of every door they tried to walk through, as you might expect. After a few weeks, their brains "retrained" themselves to see the world with the glasses on, and everything was fine. Then they took the glasses off and everyone was bumping into the right-hand side of things until their brains "unlearned" the glasses.)
> In my opinion, the truly interesting part of this article is that once his technological aids were removed, this guy ceased to be able to complete basic tasks like walking. This has significant ramifications for wearable computing. Is it augmented reality? Or is it a crutch without which he can't function?
"Yes and yes."
And that's precisely the kind of stuff he's researching.
(Once my snowshoes were removed, I ceased to be able to walk in 4-foot-deep snow. Are my snowshoes a mobility-augmentor or a crutch?)
Does this guy EVER take a SHOWER?!?!?!
-Russ
Me
Despite the claims in the slashdot blurb, Mann does not have any implants. The NYTimes story mentions that electrodes were removed from his skin. These are the same as those sticky things they attach when someone gets an EKG or polygraph test, and are presumably used by Mann to measure physiological things like heart rate or skin conductance. Mann claims that when they were removed he bled -- kind of like ripping off a really sticky band-aid...
"Any old damn thing in the name of security"?
Let's think about this hypothetically. You're a security guard. Your job is to ensure that planes don't blow up. Six months ago thousands of people died because security failed, so there's pressure on you to be extremely careful.
So this guy shows up at your post and the metal detector goes off. The guy says he can explain, and pulls up his shirt to reveal wires all over his undershirt leading into a couple of boxes, also concealed underneath his clothing. He then helpfully informs you that he's a cyborg, and that he has a letter from his doctor.
Personally, if I was in this situation, I'd have two concerns. First, this guy's telling me he's a cyborg, which frankly gives me doubts about his mental stability. Second, he's got wires and batteries and all kinds of crap concealed under his clothing. Sure, he's telling me that it's a computer, but it looks like a bomb to me. The boxes are screwed shut, so I can't see what's inside them, and he won't let me run it through the X-ray. These are also custom boxes that look like no computer I've ever seen.
Now, how're you going to determine the truth of the matter? I seriously doubt a security guard is keeping up on the state of wearable computing, so you're not going to recognize Steve Mann. Mann's got a note from his doctor and other documentation about this equipment, but you have no reason to think that these documents are credible. Maybe you call your boss to see if he knows anything about this, and more likely than not your boss hasn't been informed, because the message has been lost in the corporate fog. Or maybe he has been informed, but he's in the bathroom and you can't get him on the phone.
So you're standing there at the checkpoint, with a man in front of you whom you have many reasons to believe might be wearing a bomb, and you have only his word that it's a computer.
I don't think anyone in this situation would just let him hop on the plane. Maybe you disagree, and that's fine. But in that case I sure hope you aren't working in airport security.
Monkeytreats
I just saw a 90 minute film on Steve Mann called Cyberman at SXSW in Austin, basically he has for about 20 years now hooked up a camera and video screen to his glasses. I believe his setup can now zoom, playback and bring up a crude command line prompt, he also has a single hand keyboard for input, and yes he walks around with this all the time. He also has renegade antennas setup around his city to stream video from his head to the web.
However a few times they showed him going into retailers like walmart and gap with a consumer video camera (just to start shit). When an employee asks him to not bring the video camera in, he starts being a little smart ass about it. like "Well don't you have video cameras in here, why can you video tape me and I can't video tape you", "What if I told you that my glasses we're a video camera, would that be ok?". generally not agreeing with the store and making a jackass out of himself.
I also saw him take off his glasses constantly, he would slip them off to do something, then put them back to walk around (then look around like a space cadet ), but it did not seem that he was in any way disoriented without his gear. So I don't buy that all of a sudden once his stuff was busted up by the security guards (which we're just trying to do there freakin job) that he started bumping into things, or at least not more then normally.
I think what happened at the airport is that for "I'm cyberman" reasons he opted to keep his gear on, got shit from the security guards, proceeded to be a complete smartass while thinking, "if they fuck with me, I have it all on film", but when they broke his gear and is alibi that's when he really god pissed. I'm sure he was already expecting shit, but maybe hoping he could have covert footage of it to show the 8 o-clock news as well.
-Jon
this is my sig.
Letters from doctors and airlines mean nothing. Their pieces of paper that are easily forged.
No rational security guard or "manager" doing their jobs would have the knowledge or authority to make the kind of exceptions to security procedures that this guy expected.
I am highly concerned he was let through Pearson security so easily. Ripped from his skin? Disoriented and couldn't walk straight? Half a million dollars of equipment? Whatever. Cyborg? If it is that bad, he should not have been flying, not without a Transport Canada ruling, like are needed for other highly exceptional circumstances.
Give me a break. The "article" as well as the Slashdot lead in all sound *HIGHLY* one sided.
I give this side of the story a credibility rating of 2 out of 10, and the possibility that Professor Steve Mann is a pompous jackass a 7 out of 10. That the people in St. Johns did their job as we've requested them to do? 8 out of 10, losing points for putting his video glasses in with the baggage and not keeping track of his possessions.