Dogs Trained to Sniff Out Piracy

RockDoctor writes "Northern Ireland has for decades been using sniffer dogs to detect bombs and bomb-making materials. According to the BBC, a dog trainer in the Province has trained two dogs to sniff out some of the chemicals used in the manufacture of optical discs. While this has an obvious risk of false positives (polycarbonate plastics and their associated plasticizer additives are used in many other industries, for example), it does seem to be effective at locating discs which are not declared in customs manifests, and doing so much faster than human inspection of the cargo can do."

Comments

Re:Who would have though?

[flyingfsck]

This is probably to catch 'round tripping' tax avoidance. This technique was accidentally discovered by Sir Richard Branson when he started Virgin Media. Basically what he did, was to export discs to France with faulty paperwork or something, have it refused entry, then he turned around and drove back to Britain. Since the stuff was officially exported, he somehow scored on the VAT when he subsequently sold them in his UK shops. Eventually he got caught though, once he got too brazen about it.

Security Theater

[Hans Lehmann]

These trained dogs, unless deployed for a limited time in a specific area, are there for little more than show. Although they can be trained to sniff out almost anything, they aren't robots. The dogs treat it as a game, but they need frequent breaks or they'll quickly tire of it. You can't just march a dog for 8 hours around the airport and expect him to magically find any contraband that finds its way into the building. They may be the best choice in a situation such as a building collapse, where they need to find bodies in an area of a few thousand square feet, but to expect that even hundreds of these dogs will be able to sniff the millions of cargo containers that come into this country every year is laughable. Besides, since it's perfectly legal to ship blank media, anyone in the bootlegging business will just declare the cargo and it will get lost among the false positives of all the other blank DVDs that come in from overseas. But I guess that trained pooches do make for good press releases, letting everyone know that something is being done about this horrible scourge of bit copying.