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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."
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they just shoot your ass.
for innocent passengers as well, who, when faced with M-16 toting guys can't avoid an "uncontrollable tremor" in their voice.
No mention of the false positive rate on this. If just 1 in a million passenger is a terrorist, and given the number of passenger flights per year without bombings on US planes it has got to be way up there, the false positive rate it going to need to be way WAY down there.
If you're honest, you get cleared, right?
"Are you a terrorist?"
"Yes."
"Go on through."
Game Company Database
I found out how the lie detector works. Bend suspect over, shove device in rectum. I only hope that everyone (including officials) has to go through it, equally.
A "Lie Detector" is a fantasy. Machines can detect physiological clues to nervousness, and that's it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldrich_Ames> Aldrich Ames passed his polygraph exams for years, while he was getting every US agent in Russia killed.
Depending on fantasies like "lie detectors" distracts law enforcement from practicing solid investigation.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I wish it was legal for an airline to offer a tyranny free departure lounge. "I'm aware of the risks of terrorism and I'm willing to pay hirer insurance premiums not to be harrassed."
How we know is more important than what we know.
If there's a hot female security guard on duty, I'm gonna SO lie so I'll get searched by her.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
Easy solution. just add $sys$ to your voice box and walk righ through.
This sig is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.
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.
"I'm aware of the risks of terrorism, and I don't give a fuck if 20 guys with box cutters hijack this flight and smash it into a building, killing thousands of people, just so long as I'm not inconvenienced"
You do know that it's basically impossible for that to every happen again, right?
No-one will ever again allow hijackers to take control of a plane. And, no-one will ever again allow hijackers to take control of a plane armed with tools no more dangerous than a ballpoint pen.
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.
If only taking a ship was a valid alternative for travelling overseas.
I've actually looked in to this, and the only sort of sea transportation available is aboard freighters, which often take on a dozen or so passengers at a time. It's a bit pricey--higher than air travel but lower than cruise ships (which take too damn long to get where they're going anyway, and cost tons of money; they're not transportion, really). Also, their schedules can be hard to work with.
They're probably the cheapest way to do a round-the-world tour, though, and some shipping companies offer just that. Surprisingly little info online, but apparently there is an underground of "low-luxury" travellers who like take a less tourist-y route, and there are newsletters and magazines for this sort of thing.
I fully intend to take at least one voyage like this at some point in my life.
They searched the place high and low, never finding the door. Someone suggested the fraternity President ask each member, on their honor as a member of the fraternity, if they had stolen the door. So he worked his way down the line, and came to Feynman.
"Richard Feynman, on your honor as a member of the fraternity, did you steal the door?"
"Yes."
He replied, "Quit screwing around, Feynman!", and moved on to the next guy. Everyone else denied having taken the door.
Eventually Feynman took pity on the guys and returned the door and (I believe) confessed. When he did, there was an uproar, as people claimed he had lied.
Please help metamoderate.
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!)
I wish I could find the original slashdot comment I saved this from. I googled for it briefly and found the slashdot story but couldn't find the comment. If you do, please reply with it.
--The following was written by someone else--.
"Yeah! Hunters don't kill the *innocent* animals - they look for the shifty-eyed ones that are probably the criminal element of their species!"
"If the're not guilty, why are they running?"
I wrote about this a while ago. Here's the text:
"If you haven't done anything wrong, what do you have to hide?"
Ever heard that one? I work in information security, so I have heard it more than my fair share. I've always hated that reasoning, because I am a little bit paranoid by nature, something which serves me very well in my profession. So my standard response to people who have asked that question near me has been "because I'm paranoid." But that doesn't usually help, since most people who would ask that question see paranoia as a bad thing to begin with. So for a long time I've been trying to come up with a valid, reasoned, and intelligent answer which shoots the holes in the flawed logic that need to be there.
And someone unknowingly provided me with just that answer today. In a conversation about hunting, somebody posted this about prey animals and hunters:
"Yeah! Hunters don't kill the *innocent* animals - they look for the shifty-eyed ones that are probably the criminal element of their species!"
but in a brilliant (and very funny) retort, someone else said:
"If the're not guilty, why are they running?"
Suddenly it made sense, that nagging thing in the back of my head. The logical reason why a reasonable dose of paranoia is healthy. Because it's one thing to be afraid of the TRUTH. People who commit murder or otherwise deprive others of their Natural Rights are afraid of the TRUTH, because it is the light of TRUTH that will help bring them to justice.
But it's another thing entirely to be afraid of hunters. And all too often, the hunters are the ones proclaiming to be looking for TRUTH. But they are more concerned with removing any obstactles to finding the TRUTH, even when that means bulldozing over people's rights (the right to privacy, the right to anonymity) in their quest for it. And sadly, these people often cannot tell the difference between the appearance of TRUTH and TRUTH itself. And these, the ones who are so convinced they have found the TRUTH that they stop looking for it, are some of the worst oppressors of Natural Rights the world has ever known.
They are the hunters, and it is right and good for the prey to be afraid of the hunters, and to run away from them. Do not be fooled when a hunter says "why are you running from me if you have nothing to hide?" Because having something to hide is not the only reason to be hiding something.
Please help metamoderate.
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.
I travelled to and from Israel prior to 9/11 and, being the security geek that I am, I found their approach to airport security very interesting. Not only is it utterly different from what we do in the US, but it is obviously devastatingly effective. Israel has been under open attack from terrorists for *decades* and yet they've never, ever had an incident.
What do they do that's different? The whole focus is different. In the US, we focus on the (arguably futile) task of assuring that there are no weapons on the aircraft. In Israel, they focus on assuring that there are no terrorists on the aircraft. Their approach is about screening people more than bags, on the theory that weapons aren't dangerous, people are dangerous.
The screening is intensive, detailed and time-consuming. They do search the bags while they're at it, but the main purpose of searching bags isn't to look for weapons, it's to look for clues and to provoke reactions. I'll describe my experience of going through security in Tel Aviv on the way out of Israel by way of example.
I was travelling with my boss, on business. The first thing they did was to separate us, sending each of us to a different table. At each table were three agents. One of them searched my bag -- *very* thoroughly, picking through it piece by piece. Another asked me questions at a rapid-fire pace, jumping around between who I was, what I was doing, where I had gone, who I had spoken with, who I knew in Israel and what was the purpose and origin of various pieces from my luggage. The questioner was detailed, but not necessarily thorough. He asked about seemingly random things, but inquired in great detail, testing to see how my story would hold together under scrutiny. After asking the names and phone numbers of some people I had met with, he pulled out a phone and actually called one of them and grilled him for a minute! Then he and the agent who had been speaking with my boss stepped away and conferred with one another, obviously cross-checking our stories to see if they matched up.
The third agent at each table just watched. The guy at my table had his eyes glued to me the whole time, watching for any hint of abnormal reaction... it's unbelievable how nervous that made me! But I suppose my reaction was normal.
I can see *exactly* how a lie detector would fit into this model. Even if it didn't actually work, it would make the subject that much more worried and frightened, making it harder for a terrorist to stay calm enough to have all the right reactions. It wouldn't even matter if it gave bad readings from time to time, because in a situation like that, with trained, experienced agents, the lie detector would be just another tool to help both trigger and analyze reactions; it would be the agents themselves that made the decisions about who to investigate further and who to pass on.
Although I would really hate to see what would happen if the US tried to institute a *real* airport security system like the Israelis have, rather than the "security theatre" that we have, I found it very impressive. It sucked royally to be the subject of that scrutiny, even as an honest guy just trying to fly home... it's easy to see why they have such an amazing track record.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
"yeah that was horrible... but that's the PAST!! It'll never happen again! It can't happen again! We're smarter now!!"
Um, yeah, pretty much. Sure, you can come up with some Clancy-esque plot where the terrorists sneak nerve gas aboard and kill or incapacitate everyone on board, but knives, boxcutters, and even handguns won't do it now that passengers and crew know they have to fight to the death.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
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 software will almost always pick up uncontrollable tremors in the voice that give away liars
I'm elderly, you insensitive clods.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
The only worse thing I can imagine than the farse that is American airport security, is the possibility that some day they might actually successfully implement true security. I thought society was taking a step forward since you no longer need papers to travel inside Russia, or passports to go between France and Germany. I dread travelling now, because it offends me to have to take off my shoes and belt at the airport to maintain the illusion of security. But how much worse would it be when they confiscate my laptop because I could make an explosive from the battery in about three seconds? Or when I'm detained indefinitely because I'm a 20-something travelling alone, and I happen to be carrying a Quoran for some leisure reading.
In my life, terror doesn't come from desperate fundamentalists. Terror is the government trying to control every aspect of the way I live and the way I think. I can only hope that it's not too late to undo the damage. Vote while you still can! And pray, if you're into that sort of thing.
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.