Slashdot Mirror
Airport To Tag Passengers With RFID
denebian devil writes "A new technology is to be trialled in Debrecen Airport in Hungary that will involve tagging all passengers with high-powered RFID tags. From the Register article: 'People will be told to wear radio tags round their necks when they get to the airport. The tag would notify a computer system of their identity and whereabouts. The system would then track their activities in the airport using a network of high definition cameras. "[The tags] have got a long range, of 10m to 20m," said Dr. Paul Brennan of University College London's antennas and radar group which developed the tags, "and the system has been designed so the tag can be located to within a meter, and it can locate thousands of tags in one area at a given time."' The system is being touted for 'Improving airport efficiency, security and passenger flow by enhanced passenger monitoring.' BBC is also reporting this story, and brings up such hurdles to the project as 'finding a way of ensuring the tags cannot be switched between passengers or removed without notification.' As for any mention of the 'hurdle' of people's rights, the article vaguely and briefly states that 'The issue of infringement of civil liberties will also be key,' but doesn't bother to go into any pesky details."
Perhaps they should invest some of this energy into tracking luggage?
What makes you think anything needed to change in order for the story to be accepted from another submitter? You're not assuming the process is anything like rational or unbiased, are you?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
FBI: "What's all the dots?"
Airport Security: "Those are all the passangers and people in the airport."
FBI: "Well how do we find the terrorist in that sea of dots?"
Airport Security: "Well, they will be the . . . suspicious . . . dots."
FBI: "Whats a suspicious dot look like?"
Airport Security: "You'll have to talk to my supervisor. I just watch the dots."
Can I bum a sig?
Actually, this sort of data is any AI-researcher's wet dream. My first thought would be to implement some algorithm that learns how people move through the airport, based on the set of all locations over time per person. Once the algorithm successfully predicts the movements of people, you let it analyse what everybody is doing in the airport. People whose movements don't match what the algorithm predicts are tagged as 'outliers', and security can at any time simply request the n people that deviate most from the norm, and keep an eye on them with their high def camera's.
The problem with these techniques, of course, is the normalizing effect. Everybody that does something weird, or out of the ordinary gets observed. Little charming quirks in your personality, like sitting down on the floor in some empty space instead of sitting in on a bench in the crowded waiting area, will instantly arouse suspicion. Do what everybody does, or you'll be suspected, watched and usually, gently prodded back in line. All human societies have an inherent normalizing effect. In this case the reason isn't just security, improving efficiency usually means weeding out the weirdos as well. And all technology does in these cases is amplify that effect. Just think of the whole slashdot moderation thing, it works beautifully, but it also makes the groupthink a lot stronger (and the slashdot crowd is on the whole a relatively intelligent and critical subset of society).
Of course any real terrorist will make sure that he (or she) acts as normal as possible. In fact with the amount of attention being paid to air travel, terrorists are probably just looking for less secured areas (like the the Spanish train bombings or the London subway).