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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.
It's actually time to break out the tinfoil hat!
...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
Maybe we'll finally get proof that when Northwest claims "mechanical troubles", what they really mean is "We don't have enough people on this flight so we're just going to blow off that ticket we sold you."
i guess if i say "lets firebomb the capitol", i'm a seditionist, but now if i think "god, airport security sucks" i'm a potential terrorist...don't i have a reasonable expectation of privacy in my own god damned skull?
used on the planes:
Pilot: Could a Mr. Smith please stop thinking about our stewardess'. It's frightening them.
Jesus saves souls and redeems them for valuable cash prizes
In the year 2101
Security officer 1: What he thinking...
Security officer 2: I think he's thinking..."Someone set us up the bomb!"
Security officer 1: We get brain signal!
Security officer 2: We better not let him on the plane...
the same people whose $160,000,000 space probes split in two when their rockets fire.
Their first test subject was George W. Bush. At first they thought it didn't work.
So, you get a machine that can identify everyone who is angry, upset, nervous or paranoid and you send in the rent-a-cops! Oh, lovely.
:-(
I'd actually like to see this deployed for the humor value, except that it would probably cause a lot of borderline paranoid psychotics to melt down...
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.
Hmmmm ...
If the US government was really interested in airline safety they would require Breathalyzers for every pilot.
How will such a system distinguish between someone with terroristic thoughts and someone who merely experiences a lot of anxiety from being in the middle of large crowds of people? Will those poor souls be delayed and harassed every time they travel? It would be a pity.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
so now all people with metal plates in their heads are terrorists...
-- Coops
zadok.org.uk
I suppose NASA will call this machine of theirs Cerebro. Where is Magneto and his psychic sheilded helmet when we need him? I'll take two.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
It can't be stressed enough how important it is to have the shiny side pointing out. This is needed because the shiny side is most reflective to psychotronic radiation, while the dull side can actually, in certain environmental conditions, absorb it.
However, it is also wise to complement this with a layer of foil pointing shiny side in. This will keep your brain waves, which are also reflected by the shiny side, from being picked up by mind-reading equipment.
There is a small number of aluminum foil researchers who believe that this may cause an alpha-wave harmonic to build up in the skull resulting in memory loss or pseudo- religious visions, but their findings have never been replicated by the aluminum foil research community at large. Even if their findings are validated, the risk involved is small compared to the potential of mind-intrusion.
-- AFDB
Maybe they could equip the flight attendants with these things so actually show up when I want another !@#$ing soda.
My
Limekiller
With metal detectors, geiger counters, bomb sniffing equipment, brain and heart rate scanners, not to mention the radar, radios, cell phones, computers, flourecent lighting, etc.
How long will it be before all of the EM radiation converges and produces some kind of secondary effect, say like a worm hole or quantum singularity, or maybe fusion?
if we're all wore wearable computers and your brainwaves could be emmited over 2.4 GHz humans could essentially be "telepathic" right? haha
Or better yet, everyone could wear IR transmitters and transmit the data themselves instead of having the brain-wave sensors all over the place, just have one per person.
Then you'd have to be in direct line of sight to read each other's minds.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
I thought NASA was the space agency. You know, charged with making space shuttles fly missions into outer space. I had no idea NASA was analogous to NSA, the national security agency.
Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. -Ayn Rand
I'd love to hear people's thoughts on how this is (or isn't) different from the standard x-ray and metal detector rigamarole. Seems like many of the complaints one could register against this approach would also apply to the already existing intrus^H^H^H^H^H^Hsecurity measures.
My deviantArt site
The court case dealt with a guys' activity inside his own home... the police deduced that he was growing marijuana by the amount of heat his house was giving off in the basement (if I remember correctly) seemed to indicate that he had heat lamps on at night.
In this case it is the home. But just as it is illegal for the police to search your home if there's no suspicions (4th amendment), they're not allowed to search your car, nor your person.
In the case of the airport, it's a little bit unclear, since submitting to a search could be a prerequisite for them to allow you on a plane. You don't have a right to ride an airplane, they just can't necessarily arrest you for violating the law due to these search techniques.
So, while you're technically right, that you're submitting yourself to search... it's not because it's public, but because it's at an airport. If the nations' airports become even more federalized, or if the security at airports can arrest you for specific "intent" before action; that's when it becomes a constitutional matter.
I don't recall if there's anything in the law books that allows for punishment of intended crime even if nothing is acted on...
-k
yours,
kbs
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
I can see the court cases now.
Sexual harassment charge: "You were harbouring lewd thoughts about the air hostess, don't try to deny it!"
Air rage charge: "Ok so you claim you were only THINKING about throttling that kid in the row behind you, tough luck, throttling is throttling"
Seditious thoughts charge "So you were delayed at checkin, that doesn't give you the right to think the security controls are crap"
Didn't Arnold got a body scan at the airport? He then took his head off and tossed it to the guards where it blew up.
Great, now we're going to have terrorist's heads blowing up. Airport security will then start checking hats AND shoes. Doh!
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
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
This technology is useless. Half the people in the airport are going to light up for one reason or another.
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
It's is soooo misleading the way this story is being headlined everywhere today.
An electroencephalogram (EEG) is not capable knowing what images or thoughts are in your head. An EEG can only measure electrical activity and create a graph of that activity. Think of the output of a heart monitor - a line goes up and down in time to the heart's beating. Now think of a couple dozen lines that represent the electrical spikes in major nodes of the brain.
An EEG can detect abnormal brain activity as a result of disease, head trauma, or seazure. It cannot tell me if you are an asshole.
This idea is a red herring. I think the fear it creates is more useful to law enforcement than the actual tool itself. The output of an EEG is not very useful in a court of law.
Doesn't this sound like what is described in George Orwell's 1984? The big brother is observing what you're thinking... sounds scary to me...
IIRC, the Washington Times is a rather biased, right-wing paper owned by the Unification Church. Or used to be, anyway. Anyone have recent data?
From having worked with EEG's before, both on the recording end, and the analyzing end, I can tell you it is amazingly difficult.
We were doing something that would get much better results anything they can do in airports, which is fitting an cap of about 30 electrodes on the head, and meticulously calibrating them so they are in good contact with the scalp. It requires a special gel to get good conductivity.
Even so, the data was very difficult to analyze. There is a low signal to noise ratio. In our case we didn't have a lot of outside electrical noise, but there just is a lot going on inside a persons head. And different people have different EEG's, some very strong, others weak and hard to analyze. Analysis frequently requires advanced techniques such as wave decomposition (I'm forgetting the real term for this, though).
What this is about is signal detection. My personal view is that the signal to noise ratio will be incredibly low, making this detection fairly useless. Either there will be too many false alarms, or not enough hits. So i wouldn't start worrying yet.
I don't think this would give me second thoughts about flying Northwest... it seems as though Northwest is trying to position itself as "the secure airline"... a strategy that I'm surprised no airline has really tried to use since the terrorist attacks. (Sure, you can take Foo Airways, where the only security scan is a newly minted federal employee staring at the women on the x-ray cam, but wouldn't you prefer to take Bar Airways where they interview each passenger rigorously, require biometric ID and scan aganinst federal fingerprint databases before issuing a ticket, check branwave scans etc... I think it has marketing potential.)
Whether these measures are effective or not is questionable, and I would agree if this became federally mandated it would be invasive, but this seems to be a private initiative so far and thus not much to worry about.
> This is the second story recently that gives me second thoughts about flying Northwest.
Fact: Every singly time (yes, literally, every time) I have flown with NorthWest, they have managed to send my luggage somewhere other than my destination. I don't need anything else to give me second thoughts about flying with them...
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
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.
Everyone knows that you can tell if someone is a criminal by the pattern of bumps on their skull.....
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
This is the second story recently that gives me second thoughts about flying Northwest.
First, the article *I* read never said that Northwest was behind this plan, only that a proposal was *made* to Northwest. Sheesh.
But on a side note, if there were studies out there that could indicated that this work really could potentially catch people who posed threats, I'd be the first to get on a Northwest plane. I don't, after all, have a problem with people passing my body through various screening methods, and I don't have a problem with people looking at the contents of my luggage.
The last time I linked to the Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie. Well, who's laughing now? ;-)
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
This is the second story recently that gives me second thoughts about flying Northwest.
Exactly !
Someone ought to investigate how the new, post-911, dragonian security measures are affecting the number of people that won't fly.
If they are reading brain-waves and penalising people based on those readings, shouldn't it be called thought-crime ?
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
And once we're all used to getting EEG'ed, we'll all sit by and watch as they slowly get more powerful and more accurate over the next 30 years until they basically ARE reading your thoughts with some high degree of effectiveness. (And of course they will demand to stick a cap on your head as soon as they find out it won't work without it.)
We need to stop this, preferably sooner rather then later. The brain must be held as sacrosanct, or we'll really going to regret letting this go.
Another trading freedom for illusory security story again.
What, you don't want your mind read? You must be a terrorist. Your citizenship is revoked. HAND.
To this kind of brain-wave invasion:
Professor Chaos!
It could be that this new "technology" doesn't exist at all. It's probably just a deception that will justify selective ethnic profiling. "Gee, walk through this gate. It will read your brainwaves and heartbeat. Don't be afraid, it's harmless and non-intrusive. We can't actually read your thoughts, but we can get a pretty good idea of your state of mind and intentions from your physiological data." translates into walk through this gate with the pretty blinking lights, and we will pull you aside, run background checks all the way back to your great grandparents, interrogate you anyway we see fit, and if we find anything, you win a FREE all expenses paid vacation to Cuba.
To bluff the system, just wrap a wet towel around your head, or if you're wearing a turban, dunk your head quickly in and out of a toilet.
"All the graphs are showing a big middle finger.."
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I like the RF Safe Baseball Caps myself.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
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.
The September 11th terrorists engaged all sorts of nervous, suspicious behavior, and security guards didn't notice, or felt in inappropriate to subject them to further scrutiny (yes, yes, they let them get through with box cutters when they shouldn't, yadda, yadda).
Is it appropriate or inappropriate for a human to make the call for further scrutiny based on nervous and suspicious behavior? If it is appropriate, then why is it bad for machines to detect suspicious and nervous behavior in these situations? Despite the reference to "Mind Reading", the technology, whether based on reading brainwaves or other physiologic responses, is really only looking for signs of heightened agitation. Yes there will be false positive (especially at introduction of these technologies), but why are these false positives inherently worse, than false positives by alert security officers detecting suspicious behavior?
For arguments sake, lets assume a 100% accuracy rate in detecting stress or agitation. Should nervous or agitated people be allowed to fly without some attempt to ascertain the source of their agitation?
Now they may have a personal reason they don't wish to divulge.
"I'm afraid of flying"
"I just got a divorce"
"I'm moving to a new job"
"I'm afraid of being asked why I'm afraid"
They should just be informed they can/should respond:
"Yes I am feeling some degree of stress for personal reasons."
Many may be surprised to learn they are giving off signs of being stressed, which may of benefit for them to be aware of.
Gun toting terrorists are likely respond with the majority in saying:
"Yes I am feeling some degree of stress for personal reasons"
But they would still have shown up to security screens as requiring extra attention.
While such automated scrutiny is likely to stress some people, especially at introduction, it could potentially make airport checking much quicker for the majority, and even for the minority, since their additional screening occurs immediately, instead of in line with everyone.
I agree there should be checks and balances for the use of such technologies. They are not appropriate for all areas, but to reject them outright in all situations is probably short sighted. Many things in life are a compromise from the ideal. The ideal freedom would be to board all planes with no screening, and having them fall from the sky in some percentage due to terrorism, which would just be the price we pay for complete privacy and freedom. I'm sure x-ray screening technologies were initially seen by some as too intrusive. As threat scales up, so must our technological intervention.
False positives must be assumed to occur, and those people that need further screening must be handled in such a way as not to stigmatize them, stress them further, or alarm other passengers. Even without this technology, near strip searches in front of other boarding passengers fails this requirement.
BTW, I would rather respond to why this would be bad, if the technology works, rather than why it won't work, which in all truth may not work well enough now, but can probably be made to work well enough in the future.
Let my pillorying begin at the hands of /. Freedom Fighers. :-)
Letter To Iran
...tin-foil hat!!!!
They ain't gonna steal *MY* brainwaves!!!
It would be interesting to know how they will tell the difference between terrorists and angry people... Oh I know, the ones about to die for Allah are at peace and the others are just unhappy people because of the cramped seats.
Wow, now that is a cool idea!
Now this is a security measure that I can deal with.
One Tiamat at every terminal!
All terrorists will be engulfed in Hell-flames forged in the belly of the guardian dragon located at the Delta counter at terminal C.
- 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.
- Church funding
- A decent sports section (not news)
- The Washington Times did not obtain these documents from the government; EPIC did. The EPIC story plays down the brain-reading aspect by devoting only one sentence to it:
- 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: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:
This kind of voodoo isn't new to the legal system: fingerprints, graphology, fiber analysis, and lie detectors are all suspicious to some degree because they have not been evaluated with the kind of scientific rigor that is necessary. Similarly, DNA tests, where we have a good scientific basis for knowing how reliable they are, are often not carried out with scientific rigor by forensic labs (e.g., the DNA tests during OJ's trial were ridiculously sloppy).
But, you see, the people we elect as our representatives usually are lawyers and administrators, and they have no clue about truth or evidence. When some previously successful entrepreneur, or someone with a big name, or someone who can talk fancy, tells them something, they believe it and pay lots of money for it. Scientists and engineers to them are just more talking heads who can't be very smart because otherwise they wouldn't be satisfied with being scientists and engineers.
Note that the problem isn't necesssarily with the "brain wave measurements" themselves--it's plausible that you might be able to determine familiarity of a picture from such measurements to some degree of reliability. The problem is that it is completely unclear how reliable any such measurement would be for finding actual terrorists. For example, after you have seen a set of images once during one screening, you will remember them. Next time, they will be familiar (people remember even images that they have seen very briefly basically forever).
Any scheme for identifying terrorists has to have a very low false positive rate because the consequences of misidentification are so serious. Establishing a low false positive rate requires not only extensive testing, but also just a lot of experience with a new technology.
"Stop that man! He copied the Spiderman movie without paying!"
Table-ized A.I.
Aluminum foil hats reach record high in sales!
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Because their users will be thinking about:
Crashing (potential suicide bomber/hijacker)
Killing (playing too much Q3/UT2002)
Bad thoughts in general (Windows users at anytime the system does a random reboot)...
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
..isn't there a name for that? Anyway, I wonder if that's what's going on. They tell you that they can read your brainwaves, so anyone who has something to hide (and doesn't know how ludicrous this claim is) will immediately become nervous, thus changing their behaviour enough that security personnel will notice.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
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."
Ah, yes, but you aren't Jewish, Russian, homosexual, dirty, a PITA to the government, or an activist. Why would they stop you?
Reminds me of that bit in Airplane I where airport security is checking people. There's a whole group of evil-looking Arabs coming through carrying rocket launchers, machine guns, large bags, hand grenades, etc. Right in the middle of the line is a little old gray-haired lady. Security teams burst out and slam her up against the wall and start searching her, waving everyone else through.
May we never see th
They wouldn't have to do this if they simply divided the plane into "Terrorist" and "Non-Terrorist" sections.
"Sir, you can't light up your sneakers in this section. I am sorry, but you are going to have to move to the Terrorist section if you want to continue."
Table-ized A.I.
With five-dollar-an-hour security checkpoint employees operating the scanning equipment, I have to assume that every now and then one of them would screw up the voltage and fry the brain of a passenger who is walking through. The first few times this would shock the other passengers, but eventually we'd accept it as the price of secure air travel and we'd get used to hearing:
Followed by the collective groan of the travelers in aisle seven who are faced with a choice between jumping onto the end of another line or waiting for "Irv from cleanup" to arrive.The other thing that the press is not going to make clear is that an EEG is only a tool, and a DOCTOR must then enter that process and make a determination of the patient's health. Airports are not going to find people with the skills to conduct and read an EEG who will work for burger-flipping wages.
Airport EEGs would be more expensive than the bomb sniifing machines, the see-thru-your-clothes machines, and all of the other crazy ideas that will kill off air travel.
EEGs can help determine brain damage or death. The press is going to make this sound like a TV that shows pictures of what's in your head.
And perhaps that's the real goal here - to make the under-educated third world believe that terrorism will be more difficult, if not impossible. After all, the Americans can now read minds. The idea is the most powerful thing here. This doesn't have to work, it only has to make people THINK that it works.
"Stop thinking about copyrighted data!"
May we never see th
You can't have a nail clipper, but they will hand you an aluminum can if you ask for one. Ever twisted up a Coke can to get a sharp edge? It's sharper than most kitchen knives.
You can use your shoelaces as a garotte. You can bring crutches on the plane and strike people with them. You can even train for a few months in martial arts and make the whole weapon thing irrelevant. Keeping marginal weapons out of the cabin is not the solution - anyone with a reasonable amount of craftiness can improvise something.
Taking a page from computer security: the primary thing we want to prevent is privlege escalation - stopping someone in the cabin from taking control of the aircraft. The solution to this is twofold:
- Keep people in the cabin out of the cockpit. Reinforced doors do this. Policy telling the pilot to never, ever open that door in the case of a problem keeps the doors effective.
- Keep people in the cabin from being a threat to others. If you can threaten lives, then you can control the plane via threat. The solution is to keep real weapons - guns, bombs, large knives - out of the cabin, and encourage passengers to resist would-be hijackers armed with lesser weaponry.
We can solve a lot of our airline security problems by rationally considering the problems and solutions. The path we're taking now, though, simply erodes privacy without a corresponding upswing in safety.The Washington Times is a "real newspaper". Many people dismiss it because of its owner/publisher. It's funny that they don't apply the same standard to other newspapers that are owned or founded by eccentric people with political agendas. That would disqualify many of today's "respectable" newspapers.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
http://mlb.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/mlb/homepage/mlb_
That explains how this shadowy organization is able to launch its satelites. This conspiracy has, of course, been thoroughly documented.
I don't see people with firearms on boarding planes.
Of course you do. Quite a few of them, although they don't advertise it. I've done it myself. All it took was a laminated plastic ID card and some photocopied printouts (military ID and copies of my orders) and I was escorted past security and allowed on the plane while carrying a 9mm pistol with 30 rounds of ammunition.
There's actually a wide assortment of badges, IDs and paperwork that will allow you to take a firearm onto a plane. Most of them would be pretty easy to forge.
Yet another example of why all of this supposed airport security is a complete crock. Its only purpose is to convince the masses that their government is "taking action".
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with (100/2/6)% accuracy.
you have "sex" on your mind.
(2 for males being half the population and 6 for well the every six second thing.. so sex is on your mind 1/6th the time.)
and NASA is getting funded for that??!!
$129
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
They're probably just checking for alpha, beta, delta, and theta waves.
Alpha - (8 to 13 Hz) Indicative of Relaxed, Awake State
Beta - (14 to 30 Hz) Fast, Unsynchronized Activity
Delta - (0.1 to 3Hz) Indicates Deep Sleep Highly Synchronized Brain Activity
Theta - (4 to 7 Hz) Slower Activity, Found in Sleep
They might combine them with heartbeat, breathing, eye, and electrical signals and feed it into an expert system or neural net to identify people that are unusually nervous.
In the future they'll hide incriminating images and voices all around you and check your EEG's for "P300 waves." If your brain recognizes too many of them, it'll increase the chances of you being a suspect. John Norseen, a scientist with Lockheed Martin, is often able to discern when subjects are thinking of particular numbers. He predicts that by 2005, brain mappers will be able to automatically scan the skulls of everyone going through airports to search for potential hijackers.
The Lie Detector That Scans Your Brain
They'll also have probability assessments of people instead of a definite guilty or innocent. Those with a higher probability of guilt will get more agency attention.
Eventually they'll know what you're thinking. They can already wire a computer to a cat's brain and create videos of what the animal was seeing.
All that's left is to reverse the process and plant ideas into your head.
Thank you Art Bell.
"Umm sir, you readings are very strange, I am afraid you will have to be detained."
"ON what charges?"
"This says here, illegal parking, jay walking, homosexuality, drug use, stealing candy from a baby, stealing candy as a baby."
"Anything else?"
"No."
"Check again."
"OH MY LOVING GOD! YOU ARE GOING TO STICK THIS MACHINE WHERE?!?!?!"
Then you are allowed on the flight with no further problems.
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
Nit-pic: We had submarines before Verne wrote the original. There was even one used against the British in the American War of Independence, I forget the name of the inventor (and the name of the submarine) but, IIRC, it was a large barrel converted for the purpose and was pedal powered. The inventor was its first pilot and used it to dive under the Boston bay to attach a bomb to mooring British warships.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I feel that I'm feeding a troll here, but here goes...
Whatever the reality of zero-point field, EEG (the method being proposed here) does not measure it. It's simply the detection of dipoles produced by large (LARGE) numbers of similarly oriented neurons and their axonal processes. In other words, electrical fields. There's no mysterious subatomic field (as this zero point field appears to be) needed to explain cortical potentials.
The neural basis of cognition is the central tenet of all cognitive neuroscience and supported by thousands and thousands of studies. The most fundamental finding is that it is the extremely complex interaction of multitudes of cells which gives rise to cognition, and not some unknown mysterious force.
Look, you can make whatever hair-brained prediction you want, believe whatever crackpot theory you hear. I venture that I know just a fair bit more about the current realities regarding our understanding of the basis of mind than you, and I tell you that there's nothing close to mind-reading coming down the pike any time soon.
Do I think that sometime, maybe on the order of a couple hundred years or so from now we will have the technology and understanding of the brain to remotely monitor thought-processes in a reliable way? It's in the realm of possibility.
Is there any chance that in the next decade or three something like this might emerge? No way.
Now, I would predict that more direct (as opposed to remote) neuroimaging technologies (esp. fMRI) will make remarkable progress. And, we will perhaps even be able to tell, for example, which of a limited set of several objects a person is thinking about. Or how sure a person is about their answer to to a question. And these would be remarkable feats, to be sure. But none of them will be possible except in the tightly controlled constraints of a laboratory environment. And only after extensive post-hoc analysis, and not in real time.
To say something isn't possiable with the mind is what is truely ludicrous, fantasy, and preposterous.
Never said it's impossible, eventually. I will contend that it's patently impossible right now, or even in short-term future on the scale of decades.
Get it now?
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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.
Personally I would suggest dowsing, it would be cheaper and probably just as reliable, with the side benefit that it would keep some homeless bag ladies employed and fed.
The Economist (www.economist.com) is a highly reputable news magazine and recently had a series of articles on the ethics of behavior modifying drugs and methods to "look into the brain". The article is called "The Future of Mind Control" from the May 22, 2002 issue. Sadly, I've passed my copy on to a friend, but it was a most interesting read.
Regards,
Slak
I think that whoever approved this should be the first test subject. Let's see if he has any brainwaves.
Here's a complete list of successful El Al hijacking in the last 30 years:
They don't have brain-wave scanners. They don't have k3wl, l33t supertechnology. They don't even have armed pilots.
What they do have is bulletproof and hardened doors between cockpit and passengers, openly armed air marshals on board, and ground security that's trained and clueful.
They don't give terrorists a break with profiling.
I like Star Trek technology as well as the next guy, but I also recognize the difference between SF and reality.
Tech Public Policy stuff
One, assuming the original article wasn't a troll, it must never be allowed.
I get pissed off and have the desire to cause hell death and destruction somewhat commonly. The difference between me and a terrorist isn't in our emotions, but in our intents. I could see technology like this being useful for psychologists, to help them understand their patients emotional states better, but beyond that it has no place. Our thoughts must remain our own. When all else fails, inherent in the human condition is freedom of thought. We could be beaten, locked up, working in a death labor camp, but we still have the freedom to think what we want even if we can't act on it. This would be a step towards destroying the one freedom that no amount of laws can remove or restirct.
Yes, this is a method known as MEG (magnetoencephalography). It is far more sensitive (at least spatially) than EEG, but suffers from even greater constraints to get meaningful data out of it...the devices are massive, and environmental conditions have to be tightly controlled (magnetically sheilded room, etc...we're measuring 10-13 T fields here! Signal to noise is miniscule). Not to mention that it's fantastically expensive, but I guess if we're playing in the realm of govn't conspiracy theory that's not an issue. Anyway, still can't see "thought" with MEG.
Ok, great. No two brainwave patterns are alike. We'll have 99.9% matching under any circumstance, right? Can't fake a brainwave like you can a face with plastic surgery. But here at Slashdot, it's our job to poke holes in, destroy, mutilate and otherwise tap-dance over silly ideas such as these. My contribution to this high and lofty goal? ECM Jammers, of course! These devices are measuring the electro magnetic energy radiating from the brain (I assume, since they're not going to have time to shave everybodies head and attatch electrodes to them as they wait in line), right? How hard could it be to build something the size of a cellphone and jam these scanners? Just seed an airport with a bunch of them (assuming a low cost of production) and their several million dollar scanner becomes a mere paper weight while airport security faces increasing pressure to just start letting people through without scanning. Silly rabbit. When will they learn you just can't beat the ol' Mk1 Eyeball and field experience...
Oh and if you wanted to get really tricky, have these ECM devices mimic somebody elses brainwaves at a higher output, hopefully confusing, and/or overriding your scan. They really should consult with us before slapping the money down for this stuff. We'd save them so much time.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Umm, lets stop and think about this before you haul off and create that new world order. You're walking through security and see the ugliest, most hideous security woman you've ever seen in you're life. Revolting. Now whether you're ashamed of that thought or not is beside the point. How is she going to treat you when she finds out what you think of her? What kind of effect is hearing that 500 times a day going to have on her psyche? What if you just happen to be number 501 and she snaps, capping you on the spot?
>Security Check in progress...
>Initiating text dump of last 5 minutes of conscious thought...
>Scan #1187-AA, Session 3.04
"Damn she's fine. Wow, that stewardess has the finest ass I've ever seen! I'd like to have her bent over a table and shoot my load-- WHAT THE--!! THAT HAS TO BE THE UGLIEST SECURITY GUY I'VE EVER SEEN!!! Wait a minute... That's no GUY!!! She's got warts all over her...! And a mustache! No!! I hope she doesn't touch me!" etc, etc...
>Download complete.
>Keyword matches: Shoot, Security [1% of process]
>Subject scores 20% terrorist rating.
Yep, I'm sure you never have one of those thoughts you probably never should have had and I'm sure you'd just love it being shared with the rest of the world, right?
You need a FREE iPod Nano
No, though current airport security is clearly not perfect it prevents or discourages the less talented terrorists from too easily causing damage.
I'll grant that it discourages stupid copycats. Real, funded, intelligent terrorists won't be slowed in the slightest. For example, terrorists like those who committed the atrocities of 9/11.
Basically, it makes more sense to give up some unpractical (and purely abstract) instances of freedom, when it makes life safer and more efficient.
Unpractical and abstract instances of freedom? Like the freedom to fly from one place to another without being subjected to four hours of detention and a complete search of one's automobile and person, merely because one has a middle-eastern name and face? How about the freedom to have private conversations? How about the freedom to have confidence that the police cannot grab you and hold you for weeks or months without ever explaining why or preferring any charges whatsoever?
The fact is that we have lost a great deal of freedom that is very real, all in the name of safety. Insert Franklin's famous quote here. My neighbor, who is a U.S. citizen, born and raised and who has never been outside of the states except for brief visits to Canada, was detained, interrogated and searched by the FBI last week. Why? His father was egyptian and he's been flying to Seattle frequently on business.
Thanks to the USA Patriot Act, your phone and e-mail can be intercepted almost at will and in many cases without a specific warrant.
Thanks to John Afcroft, dozens, if not hundreds, of citizens and aliens (mostly aliens, some legal, some not) have been held for weeks and in some cases months without arraignment. This situation, at least, is already undergoing judicial review and will be slapped down by the courts.
This is freedom? Wake up and pay attention to the world around you. This is creeping fascism in the name of safety. It's not terminal or irreversible or even, yet, a crisis, but it *is* something we have to see and complain about or it will continue to worsen.
However, in the case of airport security, I wasn't talking about freedom, I was talking about convenience. We've made air travel inconvenient and bothersome for everyone in the name of security, but the only people the current security system would stop are idiots who would be unlikely to succeed in any case. The real terrorists wouldn't target commercial aircraft for a few years anyway, if ever again. The outcome of the hijacking of UA93 should make that clear.
I travel a great deal, and I can tell you it has gotten *much* more difficult since 9/11. I'm a professional security engineer and I can also tell you that the real effect on security of the current set of restrictions is next to nil. Document forgery is one of the easiest ways to get firearms onto airplanes, but it's far from the only way. Bladed weapons are trivially easy to get onto aircraft (particularly makeshift weapons like boxcutters). The current "security" system succeeds in harassing ordinary people but has holes an intelligent attacker can drive a Mack truck through. Except that the intelligent attacker realizes that he would still be faced by a planeload of angry, aggressive passengers and no effective way to take control of the aircraft.
Great cost for minimal real security benefit is bad design. In this case, it's good politics, however, which is why it has been done.
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Perhaps the gov't has watched one too many Spielburg films...
Tibbon
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