Slashdot Mirror
Lie Detectors to be Used for Airline Security
swimgeek writes "A new walk-through airport lie detector being made in Israel may prove to be the toughest challenge yet for potential hijackers or drugs smugglers. The product has been tested in Russia and should be commercialized soon. The software in the detector picks up uncontrollable tremors in the voice that give away liars or those with something to hide, say its designers. Passengers that fail the test are then required to undergo further questioning or even search."
Voice analyzers and polygraphs (the so-called "lie detector") are frauds. They have both been scientifically proven again and again to be unreliable, with lots of false positives and false negatives, which is why they aren't admissible in court.
The only value to either technology is to scare and threaten. If the person being questioned believes that they work, they are less likely to lie or more likely to admit a lie.
Aldrich Ames, a mole in the CIA, passed a polygraph many, many times, as did lots of others.
Since voice analyzers and polygraph examiners make a shitload of money, and they compete with each other, they are great for pointing out the flaws in each other's devices since the other technology threatens their gravy train.
It's fraud, plain and simple. Flip a coin instead. It's more likely to be accurate than a voice analyzer or polygraph.
Or, they could simply secure the cockpit. You can't bring down buildings with boxcutters unless your enemy is willing to cooperate by giving you easy access to a guided missile.
Do you *really* think all the crap going on in airports is doing any good?!
Little if any of it is really making a plane flight any safer than it was before. There are still people getting on planes with things they aren't supposed to. And so what if someone gets on with a box cutter? Now that the pilots are required to stay locked in the cockpit, all that person could do is injure/kill some passengers. And I doubt he'd get far at that, once other passengers figured out what was up.
And then we have some really bullshit rules. Grandma can't take her knitting needles along, but I can carry all the pens and pencils I want. Yeah, this really makes sense...
I wouldn't complain if I was just "inconvenienced". But when I have to show up HOURS ahead of my scheduled flight just to get to the terminal, when - after I've made it to the terminal early to insure an early seat selection (yeah, I usually fly Southwest) - I stand a chance of being dragged out of line for some TSA goon to paw through my carryons, when it's actually just about as fast for me to drive 500 miles as it is to fly to the same destination?!?
That is FAR from "inconvenienced". I don't know how you manage to get through in only 10-15 minutes more. I've never had that sort of experience.
I'm tired of the way we - the citizens and paying customers - are both treated as helpless waifs that can't fend for ourselves and simultaneously presumed guilty of some heinous act. That's why last summer when I headed off to visit relatives halfway across the country and on into Canada I drove the whole way. I didn't have to speak to a single "person of authority" the whole way, except for 30 seconds at the border crossing. (Not to mention, I would have paid MORE - about double! - for the priviledge of being abused by the TSA goons!)
So how many people will get searched as terrorists because their voice is shaky because they're cheating on their wife, didn't tell their parents they were going to costa rica with their friends, or told their employer they were going to a family reunion? Not everyone with "something to hide" is a lawbreaker.
It's not ever going to happen again in any of our lifetimes. The terrorists burned that plan from ever working again because the pilots and people on the plane know that they're dead either way, so there's no reason not to resist. If they have a bomb, no difference. Dead when the bomb goes off or when the airliner hits whatever they're aiming at. No one on the plane has anything to lose. You can't control people with nothing to lose.
The 10-15 minutes multiplied by the millions of people who fly each day, the money for all the extra security...it's all meaningless. We're wasting millions of man-hours and millions of dollars to try and stop something that's not ever going to happen until a new generation comes along with "don't resist" drilled into their heads so a hundred of them just sit there like sheep and let five guys drive them into a wall.
But you can bet the terrorists know the things we're missing. That's where the next one will come from. Somewhere we're not expecting. And Condi Rice will be on TV going, "Who could have guessed they would use..." whatever it was. A little success for them goes a long way. We'll tie ourselves in knots and exhaust our treasury fighting phantoms. We'll over-react, like usual, and end up making more enemies than we started with while expending billions to little or no effect in the process.
All because of people like you.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
The net tightens ...
I hope people keep in mind that terrorism kills fewer people than traffic accidents, lifestyle diseases, or regular crime (one of these alone suffices).
The way I see it, many of the prevention measures that have been taken only increase the effect that terrorism has on American society.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.