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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
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?
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.
In any case, why do so many people equate "not perfect" with "utterly worthless"? If you're waiting for a perfect system, it's never going to happen.
It has nothing to do with perfection. It has to do with the fact that is some panacea the government had devised to make the public think they are going to be safer, when in fact it won't do anything other than get easily flustered people pulled out of line and harassed while unperturbed folks and the routine flyers will simply glide on through.
And don't kid yourself; the terrorists are not guys they're pulling off the street, strapping bombs to, and trying to plant on planes. The 9/11 bunch practiced, rehearsed, and studied the whole system, so they new when and where and how to defeat security. I doubt they would have betrayed much as they passed through this system, because for them it had become routine. That's the easiest way to defeat the lie detector and its ilk -- make something so utterly common, so normal, say an untruth so many times that you begin to believe it, that under no circumstances do you give it a second thought.
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