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Face-Scanning Loses by a Nose in Palm Beach
Rio writes: "A story from myCFnow.com reports that Palm Beach International Airport officials said
face-scanning technology will not become part of their airport's security system."
Looks like
the ACLU was right.
Checking a database of 15 employees, the technology gave false-negatives -- failed to recognize the test subjects -- over 50% of the time. A spokesperson said, "There's room for improvement." The Pentagon said
the same thing
in February. The false-positive rate is more important -- it isn't mentioned, but even if it were just 0.1%, Bruce Schneier argues,
it'd be useless.
Perhaps this is why I can't remember anyone's name - half the people look the same
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
a bit of a small sample, don't you agree? and how was it composed...?
Screw you all! I'm off to the pub
Airport face identification isn't practical? Try telling the Australian Government that. They are trialling a hybrid face-recognition/biometric passport system that sends shivers up my spine.
"Einstein argued that [...] God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer." ~ Brooks
but delay its deployment for a couple years? this isn't really a victory at all.. I mean, I bet this will only delay the technology two years.. maybe less.
If anything, it should be a call for all Americans to protest this kind of thing (should you disagree with it).
I think a 0.01% false positive rate would be perfectly acceptable. I have not seen one proposal for a face scanning system that has not also included human oversight.
Its exactly the systems Casino's have sucessfully deployed to keep known "cheaters" out of their casino's. The face scanning technology merely provides POSSIBLE matches, the actual decision on further investigation rests with a human operator...
This seems perfectly reasonable to me from a technology standpoint, I'll argue the ethics of this technology some other time:)
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Not using faulty technology is a great idea! Now all they need to do is repeal the law taking away school or library aid if they don't use filter technology, since the filters don't have open lists of sites and often block sites they shouldn't and don't block sites they should!
A similar system in Florida (not an airport, but probably a vaguely-similar number of people) had 14 false positives in the first 4 days of operation.
(Two of the false positives even got the sex of the suspect wrong)
Since they state that it was the first days, perhaps it just needed tuning?
Bruce talks about 99.9%, so there's 0.1% left, not 0.01% as the story says right now.
If a person is mistaken once for a terrorist (or a "normal" criminal), don't you think other recognition points will do the same mistake? What do you do then? Plan a few extra hours each time you take the plane? Get an official letter stating "I'm not a terrorist"? If a simple letter can get you through, terrorists will get some.
What is so retarded about these supposedly security engendering technologies is they can only catch someone (if they work at all) if they are in the database. This stops absolutely zero sleepers from commiting some act of terrorism which is exactly what the terrorists in September were. The only way they would have possibly been prevented from boarding those planes was if there was some ultralarge database that collected all the information from all possible channels and picked them out of the crowd for having expired student visas. Even then it isn't terribly likely they would have been prevented from boarding the planes, they're paying customers who will get something in the mail from the INS warning them their visas are expired.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I don't necessarily understand the objections to face scanning technology. To be sure, I don't want computers flagging people to be arrested. But computers sift through enormous amounts of information, making them ideal for a first pass. If they are used to flag people to be scrutinized by humans, I don't have any objections. In fact, if a computer can flag 20 of the hundreds of thousands of faces so that human experts can give a closer look, so much the better.
Incidentally, by this reasoning, it is in fact the false negatives that are more important. False positives can presumably be discarded by humans providing closer scrutiny. False negatives in this scenario, however, present a major difficulty.
Face scanning technology isn't innately evil. Like everything else, if we use it wisely, it can help. If we use it irresponsibly, it can hurt. No surprises there.
-db
False positives are fine, though a failure rate of 50% is clearly way too high. False positives mean that in those cases a suspect was actually identified correctly.
It is the false negatives that are truly scary. If a known terrorist sympathizer can board a plane without setting off any signals then it is clearly a useless product.
Luckily, humans have the ability to fuzzily predict terrorist-like behavior (now that everyone's on high alert, that is).
I have been pwned because my
we need to take a minute to figure out why it doesn't work. Or maybe, instead of that, look at recognition that does work.
I, for one, am pretty much 99.99% correct when it comes to making positive recognition of those people around me that I see often. People I haven't seen in a few years, I have more trouble identifying. Why? Because people's faces change. Facial hair, glasses (or removal of them), makeup, etc. can throw a lot of people off. Can this technology compensate for that?
I personally think that these cameras need to look at people the way we do, with two eyes. What do we get when we look at the world with two eyes? Depth perception. We can see objects in three dimensions, because we see it from two angles at once. If facial recognition computers were able to take in two separate data streams, like two cameras a foot apart, it would be possible to create at three-dimensional image of that person's face. And though it would require more computing power, it is much easier to make a positive match using three-dimensional data as opposed to two. Ever seen a perfect frontal view photograph of a person's face? Can you tell how long their nose is when you're looking at it? Isn't the length of a person's nose a significant facial feature? (Oh, and I know, if you see a person from the side, you see that, but these cameras are always only getting one angle, so they're always throwing out a lot of data. If you see a person's face from the side, you are not seeing how wide their face is, and so on.)
The speed of time is one second per second.
Clerks in bookshops don't have machine guns and don't have the authority to arrest and strip search you.
Given the choice of a false positive in a bookshop and one at the airport I know which I would want to avoid.
I don't know if you're being sarcastic or not, but if you're serious, you're wrong.
Right now, in your own eyes, you are not a criminal. But what keeps you that way? What if the government decides something you do is a criminal offense? Perhaps they'll decide that Slashdot, as a part of Hax0r culture (I wouldn't call it that, but the people in power in this country are stupid enough to do so), must be outlawed, and its users are all 'terrorists.' Of course, fifty years ago we'd all be 'communists,' but times change and the way you make the idea of a subversive sound like the enemy change.
You see, anything is potentially a crime. Leaving my house, attending class, writing papers, playing water polo, jacking off ten hours a day- these are things that take up most of my time. The fact is, no one is to say that these are not crimes. If using drugs is a crime, if someone who feeds a non-violent subversive activist is a 'terrorist' now, any of these activities could become criminal.
In the majority of the United States, it is still legal to fire someone for quite simply being gay. There is no amendment to protect from this, there is no federal law. And it will be this way for a long time, most likely. In fact, some of the anti-discrimination laws that keep this from being true everywhere are being repealed. What's to say that you aren't a criminal in such an unjust nation?
We are not the land of the free, don't buy that. You aren't safe. Unless you work for the government in a high ranking office (as in you were either elected or appointed), or have a LOT of money, you can be screwed at any time.
Slashdotters need to worry. Fight surveillance! Fight for your freedom, no matter the cost.
"Anonymous cowards are just K-whores afraid of their accounts being modded down." - Bob the O (me)
2002-05-19 16:06:51 Florida Face Recognition Fails (articles,privacy) -Rejected
Gee, only beat this submission by about a month.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
As noted, there can be no "get past ID check free" letter or ID card, since those would immediately be forged. And with a 50% false negative rate (missing a suspect 50% of the time), the system seems hardly worth using.
I have not traveled by air since returning from Europe on September 19 (delayed from Sept. 12).
In the past, I would have flown between the San Francisco Bay Area and the Los Angeles area (a 1-hour flight, using any of the airports on either end), but now it's actually likely to be faster to drive (around six hours each way), after including all the "waiting in line time," the increased flight delays, and of course the time to get into and out of the airports (park here, rent a car there).
To be fair, of course, a system with a 50% false negative rate is presumably able to detect "known suspects" 50% of the time, which is almost certainly much better than human beings will ever do. Of course, the tests are probably being conducted under very favorable conditions, with an extremely small sample of "suspects." And of course, if the false-positives were equally distributed, we'd all be willing to suffer a one-in-a-thousand delay, if it actually had any meaningful benefit. (But we know that the false-positives won't be equally distributed, they will mostly affect persons in certain ethnic groups or with beards, etc., and while that means I'm less likely to be inconvenienced, I can't tolerate a system that punishes people for their skin color or ethnic background.)
What's scary, to me, is that we are giving up so much (in many little bits and pieces) for so little benefit. On Saturday, I discovered that I couldn't use the restrooms in the BART (train) stations again, because they were closed to prevent someone from planting a bomb in them. Okay, so I had to hold it for an hour until I got home, big deal. And armed troops in the airports, and on bridges, okay, I can live with that one thing. And I can't drop off my express mail without handing it to a postal clerk now.
But ding, ding, ding, we add up all the little "show-off" gimmicks and what we face is a huge impact that provides pretty much zero actual benefit. All the gimmicks combined might provide about 1% or 10% improved safety, at a much greater cost.
While I was stuck in London during the week after September 11, I worried that things would change for the worse, not because of things that terrorists did, but because of the things we would do out of panic and fear and prejudice and idiocy. Things are nowhere near my worst fears, but I think things are very bad, and ultimately I believe that the terrorists have already "won" by causing most Americans to change multiple aspects of our "way of life."
-- http://www.MarkWelch.com/ Pleasanton California
At the metal detector a passenger's picture is taken. It is then compared to the database of known criminals.
A security guard is sitting in front of a computer next to the x-ray machine ready for a positive match.
If you look nothing like the person. (different race or something like that) You would be let through to the gate and not even know you were positively identified.
If it may be a good match- you get stopped. The operator already has some information about the criminal in front of him. The operator will do an on the spot quick check. One thing that crimanals are notorious for is tattoos. If the passenger doesn't have them (or signs of removal surgery) let them go. If the passenger is a very close match do a more thorough examination.
Every night there can be an audit of the matches to make sure the security personel are doing their job. The system seems very effective to me.
The system by Visionics looks at 80 different facial characteristics. The configuration used by the airport only needed 14 matches to produce a positive. It seems this is a setting in software and could probably be lowered to produce more positives. Even if they are false positives the sytem I menetioned above would do the job.
Why on earth would you post a story about some Florida airport giving up on face recognition, when we just heard that New York City is already using this technology? It is already being used at the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island to scan faces as people board the ferry. Way to go Jamie - raising that journalistic bar of integrity and thoroughness for everyone!
Actually, true story: I was at Fred Meyer's a few weeks ago (for those not fortunate enough to live in the Northwest, they sell pretty much everything, at decent quality and decent prices). In addition to my groceries, I'd picked up a pair of khaki pants. They've now got those self-checkout scanner things, in addition to the regular checkout lines, so I decided I'd try it. I didn't do so well. Anyway, in particular, I hadn't noticed that the pants had a security tag on them, and I neglected to remove it. I'm not sure how I would have removed it anyway, but the really large man keeping an eye on the self-checkout lines would surely have taken care of it.
So I cram the pants and half my groceries into my backpack, the other half in plastic bags. I leave. The alarm goes off. It occurs to me that the pants must have a security tag that I didn't remove. I glance around, and nobody even looks my direction. I proceed to leave the building.
Then I remember that I've forgotten to buy a bus pass. I go back in. The alarm goes off. I head over to the customer service counter, and shell out $56 for a little card that will enable me to get to/from work for the next month. I leave again, and the alarm goes off. I wait a few minutes for the bus, and go home.
I completely forget about the security tag until I'm wearing the pants and am on my way to catch the bus to work. I've gotten about a block when I hear a noise as I'm walking. Sure enough, there it is. I run home, try unsuccessfully to get it off, give up, change pants, and run to catch the bus. I arrive at work 15 minutes late. When I get home I finish mutilating the tag. Tough little buggers.
So anyway, the moral of the story is that those little tags are absolutely worthless if store security is asleep at the wheel.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Here's one for you: What would you do if you looked like a terrorist?
Let's say, some time in the future, they get the face-scanning technology to work right. 0.000001% false-positive rate. And it's implemented all over the US.
Let's also say that, among the 250 million people in the United States, one or more people had facial structures similar enough to terrorists' that they would trigger those scanners. In fact, they'd trigger every scanner that person was surveiled by. And let's say that person were you.
What would you do?
You couldn't go to an airport. You couldn't go to a major public attraction. You probably couldn't go to a public place without fear of some alarm going off and people waving automatic weapons in your face. Would you cower at home? Would you wear a bag over your head? Would you sue the US government? How would you cope?
I think the problem with security these days is that many people are looking for a one-solution-fixes-all type of thing. People need to realize that (and geeks know this, we do it on our computers ;) there are, and should be, multiple layers of security.
Employing facial recognition is just one thing we can do - granted, we need to get the technology to work better, but we need to realize that it's multiple systems working together that is going to stop terrorists, not one or two "miracle systems."
--
http://nemilar.net - Not your grandmother's soup kitchen
I suspect that your own accuracy rate is not nearly as high as you believe it is.
First, as you state, that 99.99% accuracy rate only applies to a group of people you meet regularly; this probably includes perhaps a few hundred people, and a significant part of your total memory and processing capability is devoted to recognizing and updating your memory of those faces (check out a brian map for how much of our cortex is dedicated to face recognition.) Even duplicating that feat (i.e. identifying a small group of faces) would be a major undertaking for a computer system.
Second, that 99.99% isn't nearly as impressive as it sounds, because it represents the positive rate, i.e. the chance that you will correctly identify an individual in the target population. That corresponds to a false negative rate of 0.01% -- you're saying that once in ten thousand times, you'll actually fail to recognize somebody you see on a regular basis. Not too encouraging, that.
Third, that figure says absolutely nothing about the false positive rate, which I suspect is much higher. In other words, how often do you see somebody that you think you recognize, but can't quite remember exactly? From my own experience, I would say that number is as high as one in a hundred. Our own built-in face recognition system is simply designed that way -- to generate a large number of "near misses".
So, the bottom line is: even the supposedly high accuracy of human facial recognition isn't accurate enough, and undoubtedly doesn't scale very well.
We're not talking about using this technology to make courtroom identifications. We're using it to notify security that you MIGHT have someone in front of you that is of less than reputable character. This doesn't mean you immediately cuff him and throw him in jail, but if he tries to walk through a screener checkpoint it MIGHT be a good idea to do a little better check than a simple wand wave. In the meantime, someone can be checking the pictures to see if that person's face actually matches the match the computer made. With a .1% false positive rate, you could have a couple paid employees just looking at matching pictures to see if there's really cause for concern or not. At the rate people go through screening checkpoints now, they'll get a "match" about once every 10 minutes or so, your mileage may vary with larger airports, its all a matter of scale.
As for false negatives, even 50% is better than nothing as long as the false positive is much MUCH lower. Imagine catching 50% of the hijackers on September 11 before they boarded the planes. A lot of red flags could have gone up, and flights could have been delayed, the rest of the passengers could be more carefully scrutinized. No, this is not the solution to any problem. And no, it should not be used legally any more than a lie detector can be. Its a guide. It tells us where we might need to concentrate more of our efforts on.
As far as threats to privacy go, this makes sense in an airport, but it does not make sense out on the street. People go into an airport expecting to be searched, questioned, carded, etc. They do not have the same expectation while walking down the street. So unless the cops are currently chasing someone, they lose him, and you have a striking resemblance, they shouldn't bother you at all.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Yes, stereo imaging and depth are needed. But when you look at a person the brain stores a "pattern" of how to recognize this guy again. It discards a shit load of uneeded information.
If you don't believe me, try to draw a portrait of a close friend with pencil and paper. You'll find out you can't or that it doesn't correspond to the real look. It's NOT that you can't draw (You can perfectly copy it if you have a B&W photograph). The thing is that you really abstract the look and only store tiny bits of angles, distances, colors, patterns, movements and facial expresions.
You don't even know WHAT you are storing in the first place. Perception and pattern-matching are a very complex thing, and a thing far different than what one might guess.
unfinished: (adj.)
It's the future. The Police stop crime before it happens. They are never wrong.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
What can you do? How about:
In other words, just give up any chance of ever living without fear again.
I sincerely hope you're just being a troll, because if facial recognition were ever to be widely implemented, the above would be a way of life for tens of thousands of perfectly law-abiding citizens in this country, or whever else it was implemented.
If you really don't think it matters, I'll tell you what: send me a couple of photographs of yourself, in the classic mug shot poses, and within a week I'll have you in that wonderful little FBI database with nice little TERRORIST notes all over your file (all it takes is unsubstantiated rumors these days.) Then we'll see how much you enjoy traveling...
What bothers me isn't just the "false positives," but the plain positives as well. Most of these things, like the ones getting deployed in NYC at "possible terrorit targets," are using parts of the FBI database for their facial recognition capabilities. Well, any American who's ever even been accused of a felony in recent years, even if he was never convicted, is in the FBI database.
I'm in that database because when I was an 18 year old high school senior I committed the high crime of having had consensual sex with my girlfriend, who was a year and a half younger than I was. It's bad enough to get charged with a felony for consensual sex with a partner who's within 2 years of your own age, but now maybe I'll get harassed when I go to national monuments or big events because of hits in facial recognition software. In theory the facial recognition technology will only be hooked into a partial database of certain types of people. In practice, I doubt they'll be very selective.
What if you got arrested as a teenager for having a small amount of marijuana? What if you were accused of assault for a minor altercation? What about any number of minor infractions which still would have landed your face in the FBI database? My guess is, as technology gets better and more discriminating in the field, the parts of the FBI databasde used will get wider until the full database gets scanned.
So, it's not just false-positives that are a worry, but positives against people with very minor infractions that have still landed them in the FBI database. Should you get shaken down by some overzealous dweeb who thinks you're dealing drugs because 10 years ago you got caught with your personal stash of green? And what of the potential for abuse of sensitive personal data?
Now that this particular can of worms has been opened under the excuse of 9/11, it's only going to get bigger and more invasive. First they'll assure us the database they're using only has "violent" criminals in it. Then it'll only be felons. Next it's the whole FBI database, including all the pictures of people whose parents were stupid enough to fingerprint and photograph their children and submit a packet voluntarily "to protect your chuildren in case of abduction", and DMV databases as well.
Is it just me, or is it getting kind of Orwellian in here?
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus
Give a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day, but set him on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
...because the false negative percentage means that someone who is probably exceedingly dangerous has a 1-in-2 chance of getting past your system. Making sure that Joe Bob doesn't have a bomb is something we're already doing now. Grandmothers, Congressmen, children are being frisked for bombs. At least these fasle positives would be somewhat more understandable.
The false negatives just make an already porous system even more so because whatever face-recognition system that gets put in place would in all probability be relied on to make sure it at least didn't miss anyone. If these systems get in place, we'll be less secure, 'cause the guards won't be on as high an alert, thinking the cameras will do it all for them.
Here's an article by a leading expert, Irving Biederman, describing current thinking.
He starts by describing basic object recognition; and he theorizes on how face recognition both builds on the basics, and yet, differs from, seemingly, all types of objects.
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
Bruce talks about 99.9%, so there's 0.1% left, not 0.01% as the story says right now.
No, sorry, just read Bruce's Cryptogram
Suppose this magically effective face-recognition software is 99.99 percent accurate. That is, if someone is a terrorist, there is a 99.99 percent chance that the software indicates "terrorist," and if someone is not a terrorist, there is a 99.99 percent chance that the software indicates "non-terrorist." Assume that one in ten million flyers, on average, is a terrorist. Is the software any good?
No. The software will generate 1000 false alarms for every one real terrorist. And every false alarm still means that all the security people go through all of their security procedures. Because the population of non-terrorists is so much larger than the number of terrorists, the test is useless. This result is counterintuitive and surprising, but it is correct. The false alarms in this kind of system render it mostly useless. It's "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" increased 1000-fold.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Facial scanners will never stop criminals / terrorists. So what's next? A law called.. oh.. I dunno.. FSATPA? uh.. "Facial Scanner Anti Terrorism Protection Act" which classifies makeup, wigs, haircuts, plastic surgery, masks, and colored contact lenses into illegal "facial scanner circumvention devices"? Not likely.
IMO, face scanning is the single most worthless biometric in existance--not that I'd advocate any others. If entrepreneurs want to do something useful to increase security, they ought to improve devices which sniff for high explosives so I don't have to take off my frigg'n shoes every other time I fly.
Unless you work for the government in a high ranking office (as in you were either elected or appointed), or have a LOT of money, you can be screwed at any time.
Even that isn't enough to protect you. Former Vice President Dan Quayle was stopped at airport security for the more thorough check.
I can't find it now, it was a Slate article, the author recounting his experience being spot checked at the airport. He looked over and saw another passenger (Dan Quayle) being spot checked and piped up "only in America Mr. Vice President".
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Where were you guys in stats class?
If you took this technology, made it match on too many faces and then had someone manually double-check the potential match, you would have a kick-ass system.
Like all powerful technology, its use must be ethical.
Stop the brainwash
Without human supervision, there will be too many false positives for the average person to stand for. Without *diligent* human supervision, the false negatives will slip through too easily.
Not that I'm necessarily being critical of the security employees. It is only human nature. How many security checks and stops did you happily (or at least understandingly) endure in the months after September 11th that you grouse about now? Keeping security personnel at top alert all the time is the problem they should be working on. That and getting the INS to do their job.
"Enough of this wretched, whining monkey life." -- Marcus Aurelius, _Meditations_, Book 9, 37
Or, howcome they forgot that terrorists are not likely to go through the security checks looking exactly same as their photographs stored in the database.
Ofcourse, the criminals will try to look different. And they will succeed. This system is based on corrupted principles, it is actually only good for recognising people who have no reason to change their face when entering the plane, it will recognise: your mom, your dad, girl nextdoor - but it will NEVER recognise the terrorist.
It will only cause extra hassle, and added false sense of security.
This all assumes that the terrorists will not try to fool the system. If a face recognition system was implemented at a given place, don't you think the terrorist would try to fool that system in some way with some kind of "fake faces"?
I assume that fingerprint readers should be much easier to make than this technology, correct? The fact is that those can be *very easily* fooled too! Read the latest Crypto-Gram newsletter for a story about how easy it really actually is - it's so easy it's almost scary.
How easy will it not be to fool this then?
Face scanning technology isn't innately evil. Like everything else, if we use it wisely, it can help. If we use it irresponsibly, it can hurt. No surprises there.
Ooops, what you (and many others apparently) seriously fail to see is that all these face scanners can produce is false sense of security. Knowing that every airport used such a device it would be pretty damn easy for any terrorists or other criminals to modify their face enough so that the face scanner would fail for them (false negative).
1 Earth is warming, 2 It's us, 3 it's royally bad, 4 we need to take action NOW
Because when they finally get it working right, with a really high degree of accuracy, then it'll positively identify me, and I'll be allowed to exercise my rights to have and bear arms on an airline for the purpose of forming a well ordered militia. Surely this situation exemplifies the purpose of the second amendment; an armed populace defending itself from attack.
What's that you say? That this won't happen? That security will still be something performed by bored and disinterested employees on the ground, not by the people under direct threat? That all this technology will do is to remove rights and further entrench the mentality that We, the People must be protected by a tiny minority of largely unanswerable and self appointed professionals.
Sometimes I wonder why we bother even pretending that the Constitution still applies. If anyone can think of a more relevant application for the Second Amendment short of a full scale invasion, I'd like to hear it.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
As I would the false negatives. If the software had a large percentage of false positives and a very low number of false negatives you could train people to use the software to "check" the results of the SW. In that case it could be useful by pointing out potential candidates. But if the SW has a high number of flase negatives it is useless becuase the people still have to do all the work and they have spent money on something useless.
-- Tim
TKrabec Pahh
As you may know, Bayes Theorem (actually a statement of fact in probability theory) says:
Post-test odds = Likelihood Ratio * Pre-test odds
(Where the likelihood ratio for a positive test is the sensitivity/(1-specificity), or TP rate / FP rate)
If your pre-test odds of being a terrorist are very low (and when you consider how many terrorists fly compared to how many non-terrorists fly, they must be exceedingly low), you're going to need a very, very powerful ("highly specific" in medical terms) test if you want to reliably determine that a given person ought to be treated with greater care.
On the other hand, if they were planning to spend a lot of time and money screening people anyway, and they could improve their sensitivity (TP rate), facial recognition might be a (statistically) sound approach to screening *out* suspects. That is, one you pass a face-detection screen that has a high TP rate, you don't need to be subjected to as much extra screening; but if you fail the face-detection screen, it's not really diagnostic.
Normally, you could use my diagnostic test calculator to fool around with numbers yourself and see what the impact would be, but it appears to be down until I can get to the server (dratted dist upgrade!)
By reacting the way we are in the U.S. Osama Bin Laden is getting exactly what he was aiming for. He wanted to destroy the American way of life, and by removing the freedom and civil rights the way we are, he is achieving his goal. There is no longer any need for him to act. We have met the enemy, and it is U.S.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
While I was stuck in London during the week after September 11, I worried that things would change for the worse, not because of things that terrorists did, but because of the things we would do out of panic and fear and prejudice and idiocy.
You say this, but further up your post you said this...
I have not traveled by air since returning from Europe on September 19 (delayed from Sept. 12).
Your reaction is one of "panic and fear and prejudice and idiocy", having travelled extensively, both in and outside of US airspace, the security on internal US flights is still worse than internal flights in Europe.
So you've let a bunch of terrorists stop you flying, that's the reaction they wanted, why are you giving in...?
Al.The Daily ACK - Eclectic posts by yet another hacker
The decision by PBIA to not use the equipment had nothing to do with the accuracy of the equipment. Here is a less sensationalized story from the local newspaper which states "PBIA's decision to remove the equipment and not buy it reflects the federal government's takeover of airport security". The article mentions that the tests of the equipment were solicited right after the 9/11 incident, prior to the federal government announcing it would be addressing airport security. So the inaccuracy is not the reason this technology didn't end up in the airport.
maru
I have not traveled by air since returning from Europe on September 19 (delayed from Sept. 12).
In the past, I would have flown between the San Francisco Bay Area and the Los Angeles area (a 1-hour flight, using any of the airports on either end), but now it's actually likely to be faster to drive (around six hours each way), after including all the "waiting in line time," the increased flight delays, and of course the time to get into and out of the airports (park here, rent a car there).
I've flown a couple of times since Sept. 11, and the only noticible slowdown i've experienced is the removal of curbside check-in. The LAX security checkpoint is faster now than before, more security goons + more metal detectors = better throughput.
Oh, and btw, when the check-in person asks you if you packed your own luggage and watched it at all times, "I didn't bring any luggage" is not the answer they want to hear... I'd try "mu" next time, but I think they'd be even less amused.
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Benjamin Coates
You can't do surrepitious (sp?), iris scans, it would take all day to iris scan people at an airport. Besides, they can be tricked too easily...
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Benjamin Coates
How does this eliminate hijackings, even if it worked 100% perfectly?
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Benjamin
If you start to think about it, wouldn't you say that the Bush administration should be thankful for the 911 attack? Now, Bush can do what he does best, show strong leadership. We all remember his campaign speeches, right?
However, what kinds of strong leadership has he given? He has reconfirmed his alliance with Pakistan, the country run by a general that got his power in a military coup, under the banner of "protecting freedom". He needed to do this in order to punish the Taliban.
Now, his poor judgement may very well be biting him in his ass. Pakistan has long offered support for the resistance movement in India-controlled Kashmir. How this support has manifested itself in real life is a matter of debate. However, India does not think Pakistan has done enough to crack down on the separatists in Kashmir after the attack on the Indian parliament in December. Consider it comparable to a band of terrorists attempting to storm capital hill, and then have the nation the terrorists came from refusing to stop supporting the same forces.
What else goes on in Pakistan? Ever once in a while, you'll see small or large reports about how parts of the Pakistani intelligence service is sympathetic to Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Wonder how Mullah Omar got away? He travelled with a pile of money, paying off warlords that the USA trusted for free passage.
Rather than effectively fighting terrorism abroad, your government seems to favor disclosing every non-specific, non-corroborated terrorist threat, complete with security checkpoints that close down this or that because of a suspicious package.
It's looking bleak, folks. Any good conspiracy theorist (or reader of 1984 by G. Orwell) will tell you that keeping people afraid is a good way of controlling their ability to think rationally.
Oh, and would you like to know what I believe to be the ultimate terrorist strike? Trigger a landslide off the continental shelf along the Californian coast. According to Discovery Channel, the ground shows signs of previous landslides. One or more large-scale landslides could trigger a huge tsunami that could wipe out portions of the coastal areas along the Californian coast. What materials are required? Honestly, I don't know, but I'm guessing a few recreational boats with primitive depth charges or timed mines would have a pretty good chance of triggering something if they had a good geological report.
I hope I didn't make any Californians piss their pants. I'm just speculating. And I hope I won't have any government agency knocking on my door tonite.
Then again, the most effective portion of the WTC attack might be the fallout. America is marginalizing itself, giving the rest of us ever fewer reasons to really like the American government. (I like Americans, btw).
Stop the brainwash
"I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The US Government will lead the American people - and the West in general - into an unbearable hell and a choking life" - Osama bin Laden
It's quite ironic how the terrorists have won the "war on terror" the moment the US government started it.
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If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.