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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."
Well, at least the dogs should not get addicted to plastics, like the drug sniffing dogs...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Rum.
Incredible.
Arr, thar be no pirates aboard me ship. She be yar and she be true as spit shine as all me laddies. Ye nay be needin' th' poochie here cap'n. Wha? Why tha' be chemicals fer me special scurvy cream. I swar I ne'er heard o' no Day-vee-day piratein' They be like gold bar? Arr! L'emme go ye scalliwags! Ye, canna keel haul a-man fer youst ha'in chemicals fer the scurvy! I swar ser it's medicinal! Don' let 'em lock me in thar brig! I did'na heard no Day-vee-day pirates! Dis is per-poster-mos!
Poor Long Burn Silver Disc we never saw him again.
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More money and effort is going toward finding copied disks than in finding Bin Laden? I thought sniff-dogs were in short supply after 9/11? What gives? Big corps have way too much power of late.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
YRO is overused as a class, but there is something to rights arguements about trained dogs, etc. that whole pesky "Unreasonable Search and Seizure" clause in the U. S. Constitution implies that some searches are more reasonable than others. Dogs provide an extension of search capabilities. So do X-Ray scans, cavity searches, DNA tests, retasking military grade spy sats to look for pot plantations, or compulsory urine testing. Dogs at customs are generally considered a reasonable search tool for the kinds of things customs has to detect.
BUT, customs is generally charged with detecting some very odd things, such as livestock or pets that are not normally illegal to own, but are illegal to import, and with detecting drugs. Checking for bootleg CDs has certain implications that can't be avoided in this context. First, the society is assuming that catching this particular form of copyright violation is roughly on a par with catching heroin smuggling. That's pretty damned strongly implied if we put similar amounts of money into training dogs for both (and if anything, it's cheaper to train a dog to detect several related opiates and other drugs than it is one plasticiser*). Second, discovering CDs proves nothing, unless the humans associated with the dogs can make a proper determination that the CDs aren't legal ones. That implies we (as a society) are devoting resources to training the human customs agents in telling bootleg CDs from legitimate ones, AT A TIME WHEN WE HAVE SERIOUS DOUBTS ABOUT THEIR TRAINING IN DETECTING INCOMING TERRORISTS WITH WMDS!
* I've actually helped local law enforcement train drug and explosive sniffing dogs. It's difficult fun to try and outwit a well trained sniffer dog, and I have no doubts at all they can be trained to accurately find polycarbonate plasticizers, but I really, seriously doubt it's as easy as training them for much more aromatic explosive nitrate compounds, and that is weeks or months of work. Typical training involves taking the dogs to an unfamiliar location, which means setting aside a national guard armory, old courthouse or other state owned building, often for several days, and having about 20 people previously unknown to the dogs available to plant the 'evidence'. You can't use just one or two people over and over or the dog starts using their scent markers to shortcut training. Instead you have to have several people take turns, hand off packages to each other, and otherwise mix things up so the dog trains properly on the chemical desired. That can be 20 people on a payroll all day even if they are going to actually do only 15 minutes work each, and this is far from cheap.
Who is John Cabal?
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.
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I feel like death on a soda cracker.
My dog can already sniff out Body Odor, Ramen noodles and Hotpockets, the three indicators of major piracy (and WoW) and I haven't even trained her! How is this a big deal!?!