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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.""
"It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself -- anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called."
-- 1984 by George Orwell
Zero tolerance equals zero intelligence
"How are you today?"
"Where are you heading?"
"Is this all your property?"
"It's almost irrelevant what your answers are..." That's because I'm not a black grandma carting a bunch of grandkids around.
This holiday, every person that I saw pulled out for secondary screening was an elderly black woman with a bunch of little kids. "We're looking for behavior indicators that show a certain level of stress, fear or anxiety above and beyond that shown by an anxious member of the traveling public." Wow! What a fantastically detailed legal threshold for a full body search! The TSA considers the program a powerful tool to root out terrorists, but also an antidote to racial profiling. ..."Not!"
Like every good /.er I didn't RTFA. But this reminds me of something that happened to me recently.
I was walking down the street late at night with a friend of mine. All of a sudden he yells out, "Crap!" and starts getting all agitated.
"What are you doing", I asked.
"Don't look! It's the police", he replied. "I always have trouble with them. Every time I see them they follow me and then I end up getting into a hassle."
I looked at him. Then I looked at the police. Then I waved at the police and they drove off.
"How did you do that??", he asked incredulously.
It never occurred to him that his nervousness was the only thing that way attracting the police's attention. For some reason he thought they had it in for him or something.
I suspect that there will be a lot more people being detained if nervousness is a reason to detain someone. There are just people who are nervous around authority figures. And since that nervousness usually gets them into trouble, they become even more nervous. Welcome to longer lineups at the airport...
To my shame and discredit, I was a TSA Security Officer for about four years (Somebody had to pay the bills while my wife went through med school). If this new program follows any of their other training procedures, it's essentially worthless. They introduced a position for a specially trained "Bomb Appraisal Officer" whom you call in when you see a potential explosive device on the x-ray screen or in a bag search, and this officer's job is to decide whether to call the Bomb Squad. The intense training regimen for this position was two thirty-minute CD-ROMs sent from headquarters. How that is supposed to turn an average screener into an explosives expert, I couldn't say. Aside from a handful of improvements, mostly in terms of physical security (locks, fences around airfields, reinforced cockpit doors) TSA is just window dressing--an elaborate and expensive sleight-of-hand to make the public think that their government is "doing something" about terrorism. But I was obscenely overpaid to do a very simple job for a few years, so I guess I shouldn't complain.
"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."
You miss the point. In Europe, a "major protest" means
- shutting down a country's whole train system
- Shutting down a country's highway systems by blocking the roads with trucks or farm implements
- Shutting down a country's flagship university
- Rioting and arson all over amajor city.
The first 2 don't happen here because the country is just so damned large, no one can get a "nationwide" anything done. The third happens infrequently, on smaller campuses, but not over national issues - Gallaudet students shut down teh school for a few days because the proposed president wasn't deaf enough (really). As for the fourth, they happen - they are called riots and dealt with by police as criminal acts, not protests.
While Europeans talk about international issues a lot, their outlooks tend to be very provincial when looking at the US - they don't understand the size of the country ( I had relatives visit PA once who wanted to visit Texas because they thought it was a day trip), nor the political system, nor the people. In many ways, we are still the trash that they were glad to see leave in the great immigrant waves of the previous centuries - low class and low brow. Now that they are moving closer to political union with looser borders, they are getting a taste of our world - regional interests vying on a larger stage, immigration, and underclass of a different color, and an unaccountable leadership.
My ancestors left Europe for a reason; as far as I'm concerned, not a lot has changed except the lack of warfare for 50 years - an historical fluke which someone will remedy soon enough. I'm guessing Germany or France - you just don't shake Hitler or Napoleon out of the collective consciousness with the wave of a hat.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson