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Biometric Terrorist Detector
neutralino writes "The Wall Street Journal has this story about a biometric airport security system which uses biometric responses — blood pressure, pulse and sweat levels — to series of questions ("Are you smuggling drugs?") to identify passengers with "hostile intent." According to the article, "In the latest Israeli trial, the system caught 85% of the role-acting terrorists, meaning that 15% got through, and incorrectly identified 8% of innocent travelers as potential threats, according to corporate marketing materials.""
The busiest airports in the world handle 30-80 million passengers per year. With an 8% false positive rate, a 30M/year airport would flag almost 8,800 innocent people per day, per airport as a terrorist. How can this be considered even remotely feasible? Even if getting flagged just means that you have to undergo a more rigorous personal inspection it's going to piss off a lot of passengers. Plus the TSA people aren't going to put much creedance into something that dramatically increases their daily workload, but might catch one terrorist every decade. Just another misuse of expensive technology.
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Sorry, but my blood pressure would rise if some cop comes up to me and starts interrogating me in the middle of an airport. most people almost have a heart attack when they are driving and you see the blue and red lights roll up behind you. I don't see how this is the slightest bit effective.
Remind anyone else of: "You're in the desert. You see a turtle on its back and it can't flip over. Unless it gets on its feet it will die. But you won't help it. You're going to let it die. Why is that?" (paraphrased.)
... their statistics are based on actors- who can't reasonably be expected to have genuine responses to those types of questions.
I bet there are quite a high percentage of people who, just by hooking them up to the polygraph apparatus (which is basically what we're talking about) would have elevated levels and potentially have a panic attack in some percentage of the population.
I'm betting they wouldn't even require a licensed (or certified, or whatever) polygrapher to run it, further decreasing the accuracy on an already questionable technology.
If I were a terrorist, I would pretend to be a normal person, this thing won't fly.
It reminds me of films like Airplane where the scanners stop and beat up the little old grannies but welcome the missile/gun toting libyans through.
liqbase
...the idea is utterly worthless, since if you're a polished and practiced enough liar, your bodily functions are not going to change significantly, because you believe every word you're speaking. And plenty of people are going to be nervous at the types of questions, the thought that they might be lying when asked if they've used drugs or something similar when they remember the pot they smoked in college, and generally be ramped up anyway from waiting around to pass through security. It's the same process that causes your blood pressure to be higher in the doctor's office than it is when you take it at home.
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So people who weren't actually terrorists managed to generate an 85% positive rate? That would suggest that this can be easily triggered by overall nervousness (or in this case, people inducing nervousness in themselves as part of the role-playing). What is the difference between the mindset of "I need to be nervous so that I will act like a terrorist in accordance with my role" and "Oh my god, why does this TSA official think I'm a terrorist"? It's not real clear to me.
A real lie-detector test (like the polygraph) ought to be able to tell the difference between nervousness and an actual sense of having told a lie. Otherwise this is worthless.
AARP is going to have something new to talk about soon if this is the way things are going.
Considering Sen. Ted Kennedy supposedly made it on a 'no fly list' , all I can quip is 'just think of the possibilities'.
This looks a whole lot like a polygraph test, which has been considered in court an unnecessary breach of privacy. You can't use them for evidence and you can't use them for interviews (unless you're the FBI). So what gives us the legal precedent to use them on travelers?
That number is just small enough to seem effective to the bulk of opinionated political junkies who know next to nothing about computers, statistics, etc., but large enough to allow the TSA to catch no terrorists while claiming credit for being busy. It's a bureaucratic win-win. Little hard and scary work, lots of busy work and everyone is happy until it doesn't do its job when it counts, a terrorist gets through and people die.
Then, TSA gets more power.
The only time that failure is bad for such an agency is when it makes Congress seriously ask "so who is going to get the first pink slips?"
Have you ever travelled through an Israeli airport? The mere idea that we could adopt similar policies in an airport as busy as, say, Heathrow is mind-bogglingly stupid.
They're also useless: every time I've been to Israel I've had to suffer third-degree searching on the way in and out. Oddly enough, I'm not a terrorist, and I also have no desire to fly to or from Israel again: they don't care, because they put security above happy travellers, but the rest of the world has different priorities.
True, they put profit above happy travellers.
The problem with profiling is not just that it's wrong or not "PC," but that it doesn't work. Remember, the terrorists aren't dummies. If the authorities start pulling every Arab off of every plane, the terrorists groups will soon get wise to that. They will search their ranks for the least Arab looking members or recruit radicalized westerners. Narrowing the focus of your search just gives your target a chance to adapt.
I may be in the minority, but I KNOW my BP/heart rate would rise just from fear of the machine not getting it right:
'What if it flags me, would they do the cavity search? would I miss my connection? would I have to spend a night in a packed jail with real criminals? would I be held until my next bowel movement?' (which they do with pregnant women 'drug mules' that cannot have Xrays)
And I rather suspect the terrorists that have daily polygraph training sessions would pass with no problems.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Spoken like someone who doesn't know what is at stake. I am 'happy' if I can get onto an airplane and arrive at my destination without dying.
This is really cool. Now the Israelis can sell us the tools to make our country into a shit-hole just llike theirs. Israel's enemies become our enemies. Israel's tools of intrusion and oppression become ours too. It's all fine and dandy for the Christer-fiundies and the jewish beanie-boys, but those less religious among us don't like to live in Hell on Earth for the dream of a postumous Heaven.
Spoken like someone who also doen't know what is at stake.
I am "happy" when I get to stay at home. These damn trips across the country for a 2 hour meeting are stupid and wasteful. If they become EXPENSIVE enough (in time or money), my management overlords may come to this realization also.
Enough folks stay at home and the whole cycle of "folks flying at the drop of a hat" feeding "frequent flights available to all destinations" (and feeding back to encourage folks to fly at the drop of a hat) could collapse and be repaced by an equilibrium where air travel is only for exceptional cases and a very few airlines serve only the most concentrated markets.
There is no downside.
Passengers swip their passport into the machine. First off, I seem to remember that all of the 9/11 planes were on domestic flights and therefore people wouldn't have their passports.
Secondly there was just recent concern about ease of duplication of RFID passport data. I hope no one decides to put this technology in use until alot of problems are worked out.
Just how accurate is "role acting" terrorists? An 8% false positive rate is almost 1 of every 12 people. Perhaps a role of a twelve sided die would work as well.
Think Deeply.
No system like this will ever work for a very simple reason - one well known to those of us who do medical screening.
Note the following.
Assume 1 in every thousand passengers is a terrorist - surely a wild exaggeration. So the probability that a random passenger is 'innocent' is 0.9999.
This sytem will 'catch' 85 terrorists and 7,992 innocent people from every 100,000 passengers.
So what we call the 'Negative Predictive Value', that is the probability that someone who passes the test isn't a terrorist is not too bad at 0.99984, down from 0.9999 before we did the test,
The 'Positive Predictive Value' is a truly uninspiring 0.01052. Just over 1% of those who test positive truly are actors pretending to have evil intent.
For a more realistic 1 in ten thousand passengers being a terrorist we get 8 terrorists and a total of 7999 'innocent's. This assumes that actors mimic terrorists well.
This would stop international flights dead, but buy shares in it anyway.
-- Anthony Staines