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NASA Plan to Read Brainwaves at Airports

Posted by timothy on 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.

2 of 359 comments (clear)

  1. Don't hold your breath on this one... by irishkev · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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 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 Pic2 Pic3

  2. Something smells like horsecrap by guttentag · · Score: 5, Interesting
    1. The Washington Times is not a real newspaper. It is a publication of the Rev. Sun Moon's Unification Church 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 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 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.