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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
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.
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
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
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
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.
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 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.
"All the graphs are showing a big middle finger.."
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"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
- 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:
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".
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Second, real newspapers do not exist for the purpose of promoting their owners' beliefs. Real newspapers have a strict separation between the editors and the publishers.
Sun Moon himself says he created The Washington Times so he could influence the world:
The court case he refers to is regarding charges of tax evasion. He was convicted and spent over a year in prison.He also claims he used The Washington Times to bring Reagan and Bush to power to defeat Communism:
Moon claims he used The Washington Times to influence Congress (yawn): Bo Hi Pak, publisher of the WashTimes, claims Moon used The Washington Times to promote Star Wars (SDI -- double yawn): I'm getting tired of looking up instances in which the owner or publisher of The Washington Times states that Rev. Moon used the publication to extend his influence over the world, so I'm going to go take a nap now. If you still want to believe the WashTimes is a real newspaper, well, it's your loss.