Software to Randomize Police Operations at LAX

owlgorithm writes "A USC research group has created software, named ARMOR (Assistant for Randomized Monitoring over Routes), that will be used at LAX Airport to make security and police operations there truly unpredictable. The software records the locations of routine, random vehicle checkpoints and canine searches at the airport, and police provide data on possible terrorist targets, based in part on recent security breaches or suspicious activity. The software then makes random decisions (which are thankfully based on calculated probabilities of terrorist attacks) and tells the police where to dispatch and when. The most notable detail is that terrorists who had access to ARMOR still wouldn't be able to predict the searches."

Comments

It's working so well

[BadAnalogyGuy]

I have a rock that keeps tigers away.

Re:It's working so well

[flaming error]

> calculated probabilities of terrorist attacks

To get good statistics I think you need a statistically significant sample size. And at LAX I believe the entire data set of terrorist activity is some fellow who went berzerk one fourth of July. Perhaps they are using all airport-related terrorist attacks across the USA, which would include I believe the above berzerker, four related incidents on 9/11, and an MIT student with a homemade name badge full of blinkenlights.

Re:It's working so well

[Antique Geekmeister]

LAPD is notorious for violent and abusive behavior. For those of us old enough to remember, officer Frank Serpico (of movie fame) exposed their corruption in the 70's and was gunned down by officers for it. They actually had officers convicted of being hitman, such as Richord Ford and Robert von Villas, although that was in the 80's. In the 1990's, we have this variety of killings by and and convictions of LAPD members: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/lapd/scandal/cron.html.

I don't see how randomizing their patrols will help such a historically corrupt department much, unless it helps prevent them from taking bribes from smugglers with regular routes. *THAT* might actually be a benefit of such a scheme, although it's not difficult to beat if you learn to understand the 'randomization' system.

Re:It's working so well

[MadMidnightBomber]

No, it's true. LAX is so crap than 9 out of 10 terrorists prefer to transit SFO instead.

Re:It's working so well

[mysidia]

"The software then makes random decisions (which are thankfully based on calculated probabilities of terrorist attacks) and tells the police where to dispatch and when."

Meaning they aren't completely random?

Applying pseudo-random elements and mathematical formulas to give them statistical properties of random data does not guarantee the results of operating the algorithm are not predictable.

There may be predictability of the algorithms that could not be forseen due to their complexity.

Wait!

[Anonymous Coward]

"The software then makes random decisions (which are thankfully based on calculated probabilities of terrorist attacks)"

So it's not really random... A pattern must come out after a while.

Re:Wait!

[cheater512]

Thats assuming that the humans obey the program.

People like routines and dont like random changes.

Re:Wait!

[Bombula]

While this software is interesting and would probably be useful as a general police tool, I think we're giving terrorists FAR too much credit in the brains department.

The truth is, "terrorists" - meaning radically extremist muslims - are overwhelmingly ignorant and stupid. 9/11 apparently used up all of the top talent, because we haven't gotten hit by anything since then and it certainly isn't thanks to the crack commandos of the TSA. If terrorists had any real brains, we'd have been hit a hundred times by now. Any random group of grad students from a top-tier university could perpetrate a more deadly attack than 9/11 with an afternoon's planning. We're safe largely because our enemy is so woefully stupid - which of course you more or less have to be if you're a religious fanatic.

I lived in the Gulf for several years in a quiet little country you seldom read about, and while it isn't a hotbed for terrorists it does have a small extremist sect. These geniuses decided they would blow up a local shopping festival, targeting not Americans or other foreigners in the country but rather their own countrymen who were being corrupted by sinful materialism, etc. We're talking families out shopping here, not military targets of course. So these guys pile a truck full of explosives and grenades and ammunition, all set to drive it right into the middle of the festival and set it off. But what happens? They crashed the truck on the way there - they drove too fast through roundabout and rolled the thing over because it was so heavy, so all their stuff just poured out on the road.

Again, we are safe only because it's brain surgeons like this who are "the terrorists". If there were actually criminal masterminds out there willing to conduct suicide missions, then we'd be in serious trouble.

Re:Wait!

[Bombula]

Like many who have happily drunk the Kool-Aid, you seem to think that the conflict in Iraq is a war. It is not. The congressional resolution authorized military action, but made no formal declaration of war. Since 'securing' Iraq - i.e. toppling the Hussein government - US forces have been engaged overwhelmingly in peace-keeping and policing activities. Despite the tripe broadcast by the Bush administration, there is a neglible 'enemy' presence in Iraq; there is only internal strife, insurgency and rebellion to foreign occuption. That 2% of these people who resist the (illegal) US occupation happen to be categorized as 'Al Qaeda' by the US government itself is transparent evidence of what a sham the 'war on terror' there is.

There is no 'winning' a policing mission. There is no 'winning' an occupation. There IS NO FUCKING WAR TO WIN in Iraq. The people we're fighting ARE pathetic - they are desperately poor, half-starving and scarcely even literate.

The situations in Iraq and Afghanistan are little different than Vietnam: it is impossible to fully secure any sufficiently rugged terrain from geurilla adversaries. We killed three million Vietnamese - THREE MILLION - and still didn't manage to get anywhere fucking near 'Mission Accomplished' there - no, the last Americans fled from the roof of the US Embassy by helicopter.

You don't have to be smart to hide in the woods or the mountains of your own country and shoot a gun at any foreigner you see. But you DO have to be smart and educated to blow up airplanes and buildings in someone else's country. THAT is why we haven't been hit again. It also helps that the 'terror' part of terrorism has already been achieved by terrorists. They wouldn't have succeeded but for all the money that it helps the Bush administration and the media make to fan the flames of paranoia and fear in America.

When my ludicrously cowardly countrymen stop being afraid that terrorists are going to blow up their strip mall in Nowheresville North Dakota, THEN we'll have won the 'war on terror'.

Yeah that help

[aepervius]

Because we all know that terrorist try to actively avoid canine search and airport security roaming all over the airport, as opposed to, say, passing successfully through the choke point where you have to go through x-ray and removing your belt, pants, shoe and underwear (soon to come). And naturally such said terrorist will go into the database and search for route of police to actively avoid them. /Security Theater. It looks to me it is more designed for drug and other smuggling criminal activity than terrorist. But hey, the commie are there to get you ! Sorry , I meant witches. Hrm. terrorist.

Can you spell "Hacker"?

[itsybitsy]

H. A. C. K. E. R.

Hack into the ARMOR system, alter the code, have it generate the routes for you and you won't have to "guess" it's random predictions.

The COPS won't know the difference when they are dispatched to places at the airport. If fact it could dispatch them so that they are FAR away from the real action taking place. If fact you could dispatch them with instructions that a terrorist action was taking place on the other side of the airport with descriptions of innocents as the terrorists causing the police to be terrorists upon those innocents. Well, that's not that unusual since the police are usually domestic terrorists anyhow for most people that they interact with.

Re:Can you spell "Hacker"?

[Thomas M Hughes]

Yes, because it's easy for terrorists to train a highly skilled computer programmer and infiltrate them into a system where they get access to the source code for security checkpoints, recompile it, and do all that without having a single background check performed on them. Hacking of this caliber is far easier than say...just getting a large enough pool of suicide bombers and just brute forcing it.

If it's a random probability, if you try enough times, you'll get through eventually. This is far more likely (and realistic) than some Hollywood terrorist hacker plot.

Not a good idea at all

[SuperKendall]

Terrorists though don't actually have that many people to waste on an operation - and if a bunch of suspicious guys get caught all over the airport at once, they would simply lock everything down and really give people there the once-over.

It might work as a gag but wouldn't do anything actually harmful.

They way they do things already with behavior observation is probably the best possible approach because that way they do not target any particular nationality or race, and even false positives mean you get a chance to calm someone down upset about something that might be abusive to the airline crew.

Re:I leaked the algorithm:

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a flaw in your algorithm. The first iteration will goAfterTheBeardedGuy even if beardedguy != brown. Also, what happens when beardedguy stops being == to brown, the loop ends. Something like the following would probably work better.

while( civilian = FindCivilian() )
{
  if( civilian.color == brown && civilian.features == bearded )
    goAfterTheBeardedGuy();
}

Suck my Philip K. Dick

[pachura]

It was Philip, not Robert A. Great book, anyways.