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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?
Play more poker.
"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
"Don't FACE me, bro!"
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
"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!"
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
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...
Anyone seeing my facial expression as I pass through a US airport will immediately see someone pissed off at the delay, disruption and unbelieveable hassle involved with TSA controlled air travel.
Ed Almos
The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. - Tacitus, 56-120 A.D.
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.
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...
Apparently your "sarcasm detection officers" are on strike.
http://www.CelloFourteGroupie.net
I pick the line with the female screener and just stare at her tits the whole time.
>Bear in mind you don't get shot for looking suspicious
Oh really?
In London you do: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Charles_de_Menezes
Hmmm... the gov't does one thing badly, so the gov't shouldn't do anything? How stupid is that. Hey, I believe in small government, but there is no logic to your argument.
I guess we should all take care of our own roads, buy a fire truck to park in each driveway, take turns policing the streets, pay a local company to do medical research on diseases we don't have (and hardly anyone has), etc.
I have no idea whether government managed health care is a good idea. But politicizing the issue doesn't help us learn anything. If you must bring politics into it, I'll just note that the "tax-and-spend" Republicans haven't done much better at managing the country - the just spend the money on different things.
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
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.
Your ignorance still astounds me.
..."Super Power" is about economic power, military might, and global influence. I'm seriously not interested in getting into a pissing match over this. I mentioned it only to illustrate that it's patently ABSURD to assume a country like the US has not had an enormous number of protests. You decided to fix upon those 2 words in my post, probably because you found yourself unable to say much about the crux of my argument.
First, I named 6 large protests. Not "4 or 5."
Second, I alluded to NEAR CONSTANT PROTEST of the Iraq War since 2002. Millions of people have been involved in these.
Third, It's a bit pedantic of you to assume that I, a mere mortal, was able to name EVERY LARGE PROTEST in our VAST nation over the last 30 years, isn't it? Especially considering I'm 25....
Fourth, what makes you think they didn't accomplish anything?
Fifth, I've heard your former Prime Minister Blair call the US the "last remaining super power" more than once. I'm not bragging, i'm just stating the facts. The measure of a "Super Power" is not how many nukes does one have. That's the measure of a "Nuclear Power."
And finally, most Americans haven't protested fuel prices because it's an inconvenience, not an atrocity. Most of us just drive less, drive slower, and drive more efficient vehicles.
"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
... Wait until the next disgruntled teen steps up to your favorite Wall-mart totin' a bigass shooter.
:) ... Just my two cents
Anyways enough of the stupid talk,
I strongly feel that the US should focus more on taking away the causes of all this senseless terror. You might feel safe but the root of the evil is still there.
And this evil doesn't stem from some crazy ass muslims here and there who just happen to like offing people, just because there are crazy bastards or something.
No, these problems all arise because people, Muslims, Jews and Christians (and throw in some Hindus for good measure) alike are falling victim to injustice, thus making them susceptible to the warmongering of only a handfull of so called 'leaders'.
The Jews got killed in WWII, so the were a bit pissed (and reasonably so). So they went of and conquered themselves some Palestinian land, thus making these guys unhappy (again, reasonably so). You end up with a bunch of Palestinians having nothing anymore, living in the stone age and no discernible way out. In a situation like that it only takes one nut to step up and say 'it's them Jews ho did this to us, lets go out and kill a few...'
Palestinians kill some Jews, Jews blow Lebanon to pieces with some clusterboms and padabing padaboom, you have a full scale war on your hands.
Whose fault is this? Nobodies, except maybe the allies (I explicitly don't blame the US all on it's own) from WWOII who decided to try and create Israel in the way they did. This should have been done using more diplomatic ways I think, even if that would have taken 50 years. Hell, I'm no geopolitical expert, but even a child can see what went wrong.
Same deal with Afghanistan. Russians needed to go so Mujahedein got funded. Once the Russians were gone there was nobody to support the merging nation of Afghanistan. They ended up piss poor and frustrated, a feeding ground for extremists.
Saddam and the whole Iran vs. Irak story... same thing.
Why do you think North Koreans are so pissed?? Because they like to lob a nuke in our backyard and because they think this will make things better for them? NO!!!! Because they are piss poor (They were pawns in the cold war between USSR and USA) and because some Chateau-Neuf-Du-Pape drinking bastard tells them it is our fault and if we go away they wil magically become un-poor.
The problems mentioned here are global problems, caused by the whole world just looking on instead of taking reasonable action. They are not just the USA's fault but the USA is a big player on a global scale, economically, morally and military... They should behave accordingly and not let a bunch of extremists in their own country take over.
It's not 'them vs. us', it's not 'Christians vs. Muslims', it's about people having the right to live freely and not taking everything from them, making them blind with rage so they cannot think straight and do all kinds of stupid crap to eachother.
The US and Europe should do something about THAT instead of herassing me at the airport because I happen to look funny (and I do sometimes, really
I agree with a lot of what you have written. But it is only part of the picture. You assume all this chaos and hatred has somehow been accidental and a knock-on effect. It isn't and hasn't. It is the result of a sustained effort by various empires (namely the US). The US has consistently entered a country and separated it into 2 regions or clans or whatever and then armed them both, before raping that region of everything. Divide and conquer. Over and over again. Guns and ammunition don't build themselves. It takes investment, planning and expertise to arm an army, and a constant input of ammunition and money. The fact is most people are kept oblivious to this because the truth is so repugnant.