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Airport Profilers Learn to Read Facial Expressions
nldavepc writes "There has been a rather scary development in airport security. Airport profilers are watching people's facial expressions for clues of terrorist intent. According to the article,"Travelers at Sea-Tac and dozens of other major airports across America are being scrutinized by teams of TSA behavior-detection officers specially trained to discern the subtlest suspicious behaviors.""
Do you Americans realize that you are heading towards a totalitarian regime?
I got a better idea, how about checking id before getting on the plane? All they do now is scan your boarding pass. Anyone could have anyone's boarding pass and get on any plane, from what it looks like.
stuff |
Solution: Stay away from America ... if they keep going the way they're going that probably wont be such a sacrifice!
"... always going forward 'cause we cant find reverse! "
Honestly this is awful. From TFA -
... there are behavior cues that show it. ... A brief flash of fear."
"When someone lies or tries to be deceptive,
Now, creative editing aside (lotsa dots in there), what happens when I display a fear microexpression when I'm asked if I have any bomb?
Because that's what's going to happen, because with all this overhyped security I'm tense and slightly afraid when I'm dealing with these people anyway. Why? Because they have the power, on suspiciuon alone, to really ruin my day, my entire holiday, my business trip or perhaps even my life, depending on just how far they want to take everything.
So yes, when I get a grilling from a security agent, he's going to see fear. And the fact I now know (s)he's looking for it will make it even more likely.
Welcome the new world where paranoia becomes a self fulfilling phenomenon.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
I couldn't hear you over the latest TV gossip program.
Besides. I feel safe.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
where did you get that bullshit?
There is very little evidence that micro-facial expressions actually work for this purpose. Unfortunately, the US government and law enforcement seem to be rather prone to this kind of snake oil. Lie detectors are another example.
I would like to remind you that George Orwell's 1984 is a fiction story telling people to be weary of your rights. But it is not prophecy.
For this case it is not used to make conviction but to determine if the person could possibly be a threat. As TFA stated only about 10% of the people pulled over actually committed anything, they know that. The Orwellian method is if the person is suspicious then they go to jail.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Good one, but what about people like me who, due to bad experiences in the past are shit scared of authority figures? I always get stopped going through customs & immigration because I can't help looking guilty, even though I'm completely innocent. I've just resigned myself to putting up with the inconvenience of having my bags thoroughly searched and a grilling from uniforms every time I travel. I haven't been to the USA for a while, but I wouldn't be surprised to get a free trip to Guantanamo next time I go...
Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis
Behavioural profiling, including facial expressions, is actually one of the more effective predictors of ill intent that airport security has at it's disposal and it's been in use for years.
Bear in mind you don't get shot for looking suspicious - you just get singled out for further attention. And it's a hell of a lot more positive than profiling on race or blocking people from flying based on their name.
Slippery slope.
If you can't see people's eyes, it's very difficult to interpret their expressions. Obviously sunglasses-wearing travellers have something to hide. Just to be sure, ship 'em off (modern day transportation of criminals?)
Just as a side-bar, how many of the errrr... ZERO terrorist attacks in the last couple of years would this measure have prevented?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Do you really think someone who is willing to hijack a plane and then fly it into a skyscraper doesn't already have a poker face? I'm also sure the would-be terrorists already travel regularly so they be well accustomed to the different facets of airport security.
First it's facial expressions, next it will be the thought police.
Do they have any way of validating that these techniques actually work?
How did they do the experiments? Did they have a pool of real terrorists and anxious innocent passengers and a way of doing double-blind testing?
Or was it the training just done by some expert consultants who possess an air of authority and a confident manner?
Is this any better than using graphology on the passenger's signature... or having a computer run a quick horoscope... or following the methods of the Malleus Maleficarum?
Is there any, any, any reason at all to believe in the validity of these techniques?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
"Then again, I don't insist on wearing tinfoil hats. I WANT bad guys doing bad things caught. I guess I'm in the minority here on /."
/. you'll find that people aren't quite as willing as average to submit to full body cavity searches in the name of their own security. Or being hassled for hours in an interrogation room because you looked at someone funny. Maybe because we're more socially dysfunctional than average and are always giving people funny looks by accident...
/. have something to do with the constant flow of stories here on /. (and, to be fair, anywhere else people with half a brain gather) about bad legislation, bad policing, corrupt or transparently bought-out government.
Oh me too. We all want bad guys doing bad things to be caught. But here on
You might also find the roots of the more prevalent anti-authoritarian attitude here on
I fundamentally do not agree with the current crop of legislators on who is a "bad guy doing a bad thing", and I also fundamentally disagree with using unreliable methods to detect said individuals.
For the last five years I have been doing the following when I fly: From the moment I step up to the TSA agent checking id's and boarding passes I look them in the eyes. I would say nine times out of ten they check my id against my boarding pass and initial the bp without ever looking up at me. I want them to do what I did when I ran a cash register at a liquor store, check the picture, check the face, check the picture again. I'm to scared that they'll ruin my day to ever point out to them that they never checked my face against the one on my id. About time some of them are at least being taught to look at our faces.
I don't see what the concern is. I'll take a wild guess and propose that trained security types already know to look for body language and behaviour that indicate nervousness. People do this all the time when dealing with others; the only time this is not observed is when typing on the internet like I'm doing now.
Out of 70,000 people that were harassed by these so-called "Airport Profilers", only about 700 of them were found to be guilty of anything at all. That's a pretty lousy false-positive rate of 99%, which means, of course, 69,300 of these people were needlessly bothered and harassed and humiliated and personally violated.
Of the 700 or so that was guilty "of something", none were found to be "terrorists".
Am I missing something here? When was the last time a "terrorist" was found by the TSA in the US? And how much money is being spent on the TSA?
How many people die in traffic accidents per year? 41,000 or so? How many people in the US die of terrorism in the US per year? Let's average over a decade to account for 911. Over the past ten years, an estimated 410,000 died on our roadways, yet only 3000 by terrorists. So nearly 137 times the number of people in the last 10 years died on the road vs. terrorism, and yet how much money is spent on traffic safety vs. Homeland (In)Security? Am I missing something here?
You wonderful hard-earned gun-extracted Tax Dollars being put to such useful and meaningful work!!!
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
Stop being afraid.
There it is. Can't get much simpler than that.
That sure didn't cost 500 billion dollars (a staggering number, no matter the value of the American fiat peso these days). Nor were uncounted lives wasted on the deployment of this plan, or the occupation that followed its deployment.
Now that the war is over, and that I've won it, can we fucking stop now? Can we have our airports back? Can we travel freely amongst ourselves without being scrutinized by the sigmoid wielding high school dropouts? Can we speak freely about liberty and freedom of speech without being branded as 9/11 accomplices?
Anyone? Anyone? Beuller?
Ok, here's your scenario.
Two people walk through airport security, one gets through, the other doesn't.
One person is a normal citizen, who hears about the horrid things that happen to detainees and people at the hands of airport security, cannot miss their flight home to visit their grandma who is about to die from cancer, and only has the bare minimum time to get through security and onto the plane.
The other is an actual INTERPOL top 100 criminal. They have survived for years by being able to control their outward appearance and are a master a social engineering in order to avoid security or police in localities.
Guess which one gets through?
There's an old saying, only the bad hackers get caught. That applies to criminals. 99% of anti-criminal measures in place such as this will only stop the poorly conceived, the unintelligent, or the unlucky. It will do nothing about people determined, intelligent, and with a plan, which is the attributes the supposed terrorists who want to blow up planes have.
I'm all for security measures that work, but these aren't it. And that is assuming you subscribe to the group that believes they really are supposed to help catch criminals instead of just promote a more.... federally empowered american government.
I'm not saying my stance, I'm just saying the sides you can view it from.
You never realize how much manually made unmanaged "linked" lists suck, till you have src.link.link.link.link...
I'm pretty sure I show all those emotions in the course of a trip through security:
Fear: I'm afraid that these idiots are the ones in charge of "making air travel safe"
Anger: That so many millions of people buy into the farce that is the TSA
Surprise: That the 85 year old lady in a walker ahead of me in line seems to be the biggest prospective threat of the day
Contempt: Take your pick.
I guess I should stop traveling by air?
How the hell do you think our government got so damned big and powerful it could do this crap in the first place? And now we have utter morons who want to turn our HEALTH CARE over to the same government that gives us the TSA?
How fucking stupid is that?
Really.
You've got to be utterly unable to add two and two if you think TSA is bad but yet that same government would do a great job providing you medical care.
It avoids racial profiling but creates a new form of profiling, which basically means some new class of legitimate travelers will suffer the pain of false positives. I really worry about this kind of "expression reading" because:
1. It targets members of society who have above-average social anxiety, or "deviate from the norm" in some other way. Geeks and Nerds could end up being "more suspicious" simply because they either have mild social anxiety, or because they are "aware" of the facial profiling, hence they appear nervous (because they're thinking "oh crap they're analyzing my face... try to look natural and calm... but don't look like you're trying too hard!" and thus appear to be hiding something).
2. Overall, as soon as you create rules for deciding who gets greater scrutiny, you create a weakness that the enemy can exploit. The enemy knows what they have to train to avoid/circumvent, thus enabling them to suffer detailed searches less often than average, instead of more often (which was the intention). It has been shown many times that the optimal security strategy is often the one that uses perfect randomness, since there is no defense against it (see Schneier's analysis and this paper).
So, really, coming up with new and fancy ways to profile people isn't all that helpful. (Of course, there's the dim possibility that they are publicly claiming to profile, but are secretly using a random strategy, hoping that the enemy wastes effort in trying to circumvent a non-existent analysis system, thereby making them easier to catch... but somehow I doubt it.)
Do their techinques take into account people with high functioning autism, or other non-neurotypical conditions that affect body language?
I accidentally beat a polygraph test years ago because I was so uniformly anxious that when I DID lie, the interpreter didn't see it as any different than my other responses.
Parts of the autistic condition are severe ADHD and the inability to read or express thru facial or body expressions. The hyperactivity alone (fidgetyness) can be interpreted as sneakiness or a deceptivity-give-away. Other body language miscues produced will result what appears to be "vague, evasive responses - fear shows itself. When you do this long enough, you see it right away."
Areas crowded with people cause me anxiety by itself, especially if more than one person is trying to talk to me - such as companions, plus airline checkin personnel, and now the body-language gestapo....oops, didn't mean Godwin this, sorry.
I haven't been in an airport since 9/11 and I sure as hell ain't gonna go now.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
Government forces should never for any reason be given authoritative powers which are unable to be subject to external oversight.
Maybe you look like the guy who cut him off in traffic this morning. Maybe he decides to detain a large group just before he detains you, to guarantee that you miss your flight before they can process and pass through the previous group. The point is you simply cannot give unchallengeable power such as this to human beings without it being abused, and with such a small success rate, abuse is both certain and unidentifiable.
Counting catching people on outstanding arrest warrants against their success tally is all the more indicative of their low actual success rate. They want to make their numbers look as good as possible, so they include people they probably had prior knowledge of. These are people whose names and pictures are on a computer screen that morning, the officers know to watch out for them, and would be caught completely independent of this bogus system, but they count it as a win to this system in order to at least hit that 1% mark.
Also what do they mean by weapons violations in the above quote? Is this some guy who forgot he had a pocket knife? If it's something more serious like a gun, isn't he again going to get caught in existing security? I would like to see the number of people they caught who would have slipped through normal security. I'd be surprised if it beat 1 in 10 of the people they did arrest. Even fudging their numbers they can't offer a better number than 1% success rate. This program is a failure out the gate, and it is only an opportunity for abuse without oversight.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
In the worst case scenario for both examples, one is far worse.
Let's say a busload of nuns, a busload of blind pre-schoolers, a busload of puppies and a busload of apple pies all manage, through some freak accident, to collide with a propane truck -- doing the math, that's a lot of dead nuns, kids, puppies and delicious apple pie, plus a blue collar propane truck driver.
On the other hand, half a dozen guys with nuke components and you end up with all that and maybe a million more?
And yes, I think nuclear terrorism is overstated, and yes the "mushroom cloud" imagery is just a political hot button.
But we're talking worst case scenarios here. And besides, wasn't it, "Could they fly planes into.....naaaaaaah" that got us into this mess to begin with?
First and foremost, they are screening for suicide bombers and hijackers.. I think it goes without saying that it's difficult to become a seasoned, experienced suicide bomber. Likewise, with a few notable exceptions, hijackers have a pretty long track record of getting busted on their first go-round.
While I'm sure the TSA would be perfectly happy to catch slippery international career criminals, it's the disposable cannon fodder which most concerns them. Just a guess, but I suspect that the TSA officers receive considerably more training in detecting the behavior of these types, than the criminals themselves receive in suppressing the same.
There's a Starman, waiting in the sky / He'd like to come and meet us, but he hasn't got the time.
Lots of slashdotters are decrying this as a bad thing.
You're all wrong.
This is the *right* way to do airport security. Finally!
Take a look at the country that has the biggest terrorist problem anywhere -- Israel -- and take a look at their airport security record. The reason it's so good is simple; Israel doesn't focus on keeping bad *things* off of planes, they focus on keeping bad *people* off of planes.
It doesn't matter how many penknives and bottles of water you confiscate, a determined terrorist can easily get something usable as a weapon on the airplane. It wouldn't be that difficult to get guns on the plane, actually. To prevent terrorist attacks in the skies, you need to keep the terrorists off the planes, not their shoes.
Israeli airport screeners do search your stuff. Very thoroughly, in fact. But the one looking through your stuff is really just trying to make you nervous. The other one is watching your face, posture and movements, looking for responses that are wrong. He's also firing questions at you almost faster than you can answer them, sometimes asking the question multiple ways to look for evasions. Finally, he's noting key points of your answers which he's going to threaten to check -- and may actually check if the rest of it gives him any concern. "Where did you go?", "Who did you meet with?", "Do you have his business card?", etc. The answers to the questions are important, but even more important is their effect, which is to rattle you.
I'm not trying to say that US airports should adopt the same approach. For one thing, it's too slow and way too costly to have two highly-trained officers interrogate each and every traveler for 5+ minutes. But the basic concept can be applied here: apply enough scrutiny and pressure to make people nervous, then watch their reactions. Focus more attention on those whose reactions are wrong. Who defines what "wrong" means? Experience.
Oh, and then let people take a coke or a penknife on the airplane.
Personally, I think we ought to back off on the whole thing. We don't have the same sort of problem with terrorism that Israel does, and aren't going to, as long as we get someone more rational to replace Bush. Sure we had 9/11 -- a fleabite in the grand scheme of things, killing less people than die on the highways each month and doing less property damage than a good-sized hurricane. Simple refusal to be terrorized, acceptance that bad things sometimes happen, is the best approach IMO. That and, in the case of aircraft, aggressive passenger response to any attempted hijacking -- oh, and keeping passengers out of the cockpit is a cheap, easy and effective change.
If we're going to try to stop terrorism at the TSA security checkpoint, though, *this* is the right way to do it. Requiring passengers to carry their toothpaste and aftershave in a one-quart baggie is pointless security theatre.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Yes, you are mistaken.
The Million Man March was held on the Mall in DC in 1995, with somewhere between 500,000 and 1,000,000 people.
This garnered a lot of attention and the "Million * March" naming scheme was borrowed by a number of later groups, such as the:
- Million Mom March, May 2000, about 150,000 - 200,000 women advocating for gun control laws
- Million Worker March, 2004, about 10,000 people protesting globalization and free-trade treaties
- Million Family March, 2000, tens-of-thousands of people
Furthermore, there have been an enormous amount of anti-war protests against the war in Iraq, starting in 2002 and continuing to today
There was also a lot of coverage for the 1999 Anti-WTO protests in Seattle, WA that brought out an estimated 50,000-100,000 people.
And, of course, there were so many protesters when Bush was inaugurated into Office in 2000 that he was the first President in over a hundred years that couldn't walk from the capitol to the White House after being sworn-in. He had to be taken there in an armored car.
And you'd be surprised about the proximity to the White House. Nearly all marches/protests are held on the Mall in DC, which is a huge expanse that runs between the US Capitol on one end and the Washington Monument on the other end, with the White House right in between. It's set back a couple hundred yards from the mall, but the protests where abutted right against the White House gate.
You know.. I'm so sick of arrogant Europeans talking trash about how ignorant Americans are, when so many show that same ignorance about Americans themselves. I mean, no offense, in a country like America, with 300,000,000 people and, as the only remaining "Super Power", LOTS of things to protest, to assume that we've had no "major" protests in 30 years just shows an alarming bias/ignorance of our culture.
Some people are extremely afraid of misidentification. Can the screeners distinguish between terrorists who are afraid of being caught and lawful citizens who are afraid of being killed on the spot by overzealous counterterrorism agents who misread a facial expression or two?
Apparently you DO become your enemies. Or, at least, the Stasi used the same techniques, and they presumably got it from the Gestapo.
Airport security doesn't get paid well and is an unpleasant job to boot. Therefore, anyone who can get a better job at the same pay will do so. If they can't get a better job, they probably didn't go to college. Obviously, there are many reasons not to go to college, but if you don't you probably weren't valedictorian in high school. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that airport security is not in general composed of well-educated people. I wasn't making a generalization, I was making a reasoned assumption.
"microfacial expressions -- a flash of feelings that in a fraction of a second reflects emotions such as fear, anger, surprise or contempt"
Hmm, I am quasi-"middle-eastern" looking (half Indian), have contempt (and possibly surprise and anger) for government agents bothering me with nosy questions, and fear of being secretly whisked away and imprisoned in a legal limbo. So I guess that makes me an immediate suspect. If they asked me where I was going, I would probably say "home". Vague and elusive? Hells yeah.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
According to the article: "Since January 2006, behavior-detection officers have referred about 70,000 people for secondary screening, Maccario said. Of those, about 600 to 700 were arrested on a variety of charges, including possession of drugs, weapons violations and outstanding warrants." Sounds like roughly a 99% of referrals are false positives. Is the training actually worth the time, expense, and inconvenience to innocent travelers? I wonder if an observer, untrained in the subtle skill of detecting micro-facial expressions, would do much worse just by looking for people who obviously, and more generally look suspicious.
Dude, catch up with the times. The 80s and 90s have passed with the 90s posting 1 hijacking of a US flight. (Out of the tens of thousands of flights a year.) So, obviously, it's time to start detaining people based on some behavioral traits that are sure to be kept secret by those doing the watching. (Can't let the terrorists know what we're looking for.) After all, just like with the No Fly and Watchlist there's no way this will be abused...
Your mind looks a little cramped. Why don't you stretch it a little?