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NASA Plan to Read Brainwaves at Airports
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.
...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.
-Styopa
thoughtcrime
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.
If the US government was really interested in airline safety they would require Breathalyzers for every pilot.
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!
Jesus saves souls and redeems them for valuable cash prizes
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
I'm sure you've never thought about BAD things before, right? Pay attention next time you drive - the bastard that cuts you off, the stupid 3 red lights in a row, the bumper-to-bumper when you're late for your daughter's recital... now apply that to an airport, only there's 400 gaggling tourists in front of you, some snarky ticket agent, and you're late for your $2300 flight to Somewhere. Any thoughts of rampant destruction now?
The last time I flew, I got pulled aside so they could check the 11 drum cymbals I had in a carry-on bag. As they were looking, the guy next to me was getting his frisbee impounded. This thing was dirty, small, plastic, and obviously well-used. I supposed he could have thrown it in somebody's face, and taken the plane into the Empire State Building (?), but I just thought, "You stupid suckers. You're taking this guy's frisbee, and letting me through with 11 discs that could probably take somebody's head off if I threw them hard enough, not to mention provide a wicked cutting edge if I snapped one in half."
I had plenty of images of headless flight attendants running around. Sick? Sure. Illegal? Not yet. Did I do anything like that? You would have heard about it, I'm sure.
Keep your goddamn scanners out of my head, because it's none of your goddamn business what I'm thinking, unless I tell you. It ain't public unless you use one of the senses you were born with, and enhancement doesn't count. You comfortable with everybody running around with Sony camcorders that see through peoples' clothes? I haven't implicitly submitted myself to anything - that's the whole reason I wear clothing, and have a suitcase that's black, not clear.
The only reason I'm not worried about this is that I'd guess there's a fair number of people who think the same thing, and the amount of travellers they'd have to detain would be unmanageable (considering they can't even do a decent job as it is).
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
I would be concerned with effectiveness, but I would also be concerned with what's next. No government ever gives back the power it takes to itself, and certainly ours doesn't. And I don't believe, legally, that a police officer can stop me on the street and interrogate me just because I "look suspicious". In fact there have been a large number of court cases dealing with this subject. So, in order to feel safe we are going to let rent-a-cops stop us in the airport and interrogate us because our brain emitted electrical signals that might indicate stress or anger? Does this sound like it is A. unconstitutional and B. unworkable.
I am unwilling to give up ANY of my rights, freedoms, privileges or privacy just so you can feel safer. None. Ultimately, if we follow that path we will be safe from terrorists and criminals ..... except for the ones in the government. Think old Soviet Union or Nazi Germany.
In my universe I'm perfectly normal, it's not my fault you don't live in my universe.
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.
This is impossible, in about every way I can think of.
1. Technically: how are you going to check all those people's brainwaves within a reasonable amount of time?
2. Scientifically: what can you deduct from these waves, without knowing anything about the person's 'normal' behaviour, background, beliefs?
3. Legally: what are you going to do when somebody has an irregular brainwave-graph or fast heartbeat? Lock gramps away... based on what?
4. Politically: who will approve this... Correctomundo, nobody. Especially not the badass liars and politicians who are behind the law. Imagine, funding technology that sees through people... Must be their worst nightmare.
My girlfriend is deadly afraid of flying. Will she be refused access to the plane (not as if _she_ would mind)?
No, this is just FUD. I hope NASA sticks to space missions 'n' stuff, otherwise they'll drop from the 'slashdot cool companies and organisations' to the 'slashdot blacklist' in no time.