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Homeland Security Department Testing "Pre-Crime" Detector
holy_calamity writes "New Scientist reports that the Department of Homeland Security recently tested something called Future Attribute Screening Technologies (FAST) — a battery of sensors that determine whether someone is a security threat from a distance. Sensors look at facial expressions, body heat and can measure pulse and breathing rate from a distance. In trials using 140 volunteers those told to act suspicious were detected with 'about 78% accuracy on mal-intent detection, and 80% on deception,' says a DHS spokesman."
Sensors look at facial expressions, body heat and can measure pulse and breathing rate from a distance
...And most importantly, skin colour?
Seriously, is there anything a device like this can do that's either more useful or less invasive than a human watching people walking past and profiling/screening them on what they can see?
Is crushing a suspect's child's testicles illegal?
John Yoo: "No, [if] the President thinks he needs to do that."
Does this sound idiotic to anyone else? Of course it's going to work for people who are told how to act in order to get the device to flag them.
The summary talks about the sujects being told to act suspicious. So, if you are told to be suspicious does this make any difference from someone who is actually planning something nasty? I suppose it is difficult to find subjects who are unaware they are being observed, and yet also intent on doing something bad. Nevertheless, I'd hypothesize there might be significant, observable differences between the two groups.
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
Sorry, but 78% is not even REMOTELY accurate to consider someone dangerous. There is already a high enough false accusation rate.
Excuse me while I gather the virgin sacrifice and assemble the pentagram required to solve your problem
In other news today, Homeland Security has detained the entire Chili Cook-off Carnival event after their new FAST software registered positive hits on EVERYTHING there, including some domesticated animals and a squirrel with three legs.
"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." -Groucho Marx
None of that matters - what's important is the false positive rate, ie. the proportion of people with no malicious intent who get flagged up. If it's as high as 1% the system will be pretty much unworkable.
"It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."
Isn't this a little off-base? People who are really about to commit a crime, as a rule, will be explicitly trying not to look suspicious.
"You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help" -- Calvin
I propose the House, Senate and White House also.
I was just about to finish up my patent application for a device that could accurately detect a human pretending to be a monkey 80% of the time when a human test subject is asked in advance to pretend to be a monkey.
Why do I even bother?
I'm a big tall mofo.
All you need to do now is post signs reminding any potential evil-doers to "act suspicious" and the system will work perfectly.
If everyone was wearing a burka, then, there's no way that this system actually works. It may seem strange, but, what right does the public have to know my face?
This is my sig.
All we've got is a device which can spot normal people trying to be visibly "suspicious".
No sig today...
God help the nervous flier :)
Awesome, now we have a great tool to accuse people with. How can anything with an accuracy of 78% be worth using? On a grading scale it's a C+. How many innocent people (22%) will be caught up in this mess? If the government is trying to create a rebellion by the people, then this is a perfect method.
How about hiring intelligent guards? Or people with common sense?
If we spent 10% of what we spend on this kind of crap on actually solving the real problems we face, then we might actually get somewhere. But as long as we live in this ultra-paranoid world filled full of invisable terrorists then we'll never get the chance to overcome the real problems. What a shame and what a waste.
ed duval the very last person
Just an fyi, the accuracy number doesn't directly tell you the ratio of false negatives. It's a measure not just of how many true positives it gets (that's the sensitivity), but also of true negatives(that's the specificity), in that it should both identify the "suspicious" correctly and correctly identify the non-"suspicious".
You can't go from the accuracy directly to the specificity and sensitivity, since it's a combination of several measurements. The result, though, will be highly dependent on the prevalence of "suspicious" people in their test, which is the ratio of how often what you're trying to detect actually occurs.
I'm willing to bet that the prevalence they used in their testing is way, way higher than it would be in real life (like 1/4 to 1/2 of the test subjects were "suspicious", while in real life the odds of a random person in an airport being a terrorist is more like 1/1e6 on a bad day). So this would skew the accuracy measurement towards detecting the suspicious and understate the importance of figuring out correctly that someone is not suspicious. The problem is that when you're dealing with something very rare, even if your specificity is very high, the odds that someone you pull out of line because the machine flagged them is in fact innocent is extremely high (it's going to be over 99% chance unless this machine is -very- specific), and if your test methodology doesn't worry as much about specificity, then it's going to be even worse.
The enemies of Democracy are
Most AIDS tests are 99%+ accurate at telling you that a person with HIV actually has HIV. They're also 99% accurate at saying a person who doesn't have HIV, doesn't have HIV. Its the combination of those two facts plus "Very few people in the general population have HIV" which makes mass one-time AIDS screenings a bad idea -- you successfully pull the guy out of 100 who had HIV, then you throw in one negative bystander, and you end up adding 99% accurate + 99% accurate to get 50% accurate.
There are a heck of a lot less terrorists than 1% of the flying public.
There is a countermeasure, of course -- you use the magic machine not as a definitive test but as a screening mechanism. Know why we aggressively screen high risk groups for AIDS? Because they're high risk -- if 1 out of every 4 screenies is known to be positive (not hard to reach with some populations) then the 99%/99% math adds up to better than 95%. Better news. (You then independently run a second test before you tell anyone they're positive. Just like you wouldn't immediately shoot anybody the machine said is a terrorist -- you'd just escalate the search, like subjecting them to a patdown or asking for permission to search their bags or what have you.)
So you could use the magic machine to, say, eliminate 75, 90, 99%, whatever of the search space before you go onto whatever your next level of screening is -- the whole flying rigamarole, for example. Concentrate the same amount of resources on searching 20 people a plane instead of 400. Less hassle for the vast majority of passengers, less cursoryness to all of the examinations.
The quick here will notice that this is exactly the mechanism racial profiling works by -- we know a priori that the 3 year old black kid and the 68 year old white grandmother is not holding a bomb, ergo we move onto the 20 year old Saudi who it is merely extraordinarily improbable to be holding a bomb. That would also let you lop off a huge section of the search space off the top.
The difference between the magic machine and racial profiling is that racial profiling is politically radioactive, but the magic machine might be perceived as neutral. Whether you consider that a good or a bad thing is up to you. Hypothetically assuming that the machine achieves, oh, 80% negative readings for true negatives, many people might consider it an awfully nice thing to have 80% of the plane not have to take off their shoes or get pat down -- they could possibly get screened as non-invasively as having to answer two of those silly, routine questions.
(Of course, regardless of what we do, people will claim we're racially profiling. But that is a different issue.)
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Baclava is a pastry. I'd be suspicios if somone were wearing it. I would suspect that they are a really messy eater.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I never doubted what I was doing was right, or justified, but that didn't stop my heart from pounding out of my chest.
So this device was 80% successful at picking up suspicious activity from PEOPLE WHO WERE ASKED TO LOOK SUSPICIOUS.
Wow, amazing! Something any police officer who has served a couple of years would be able to do with 100% (or nearly so) accuracy.
What is missing is an assay of how many people it would flag if they were told to behave as if they were SCARED. You know... scared of being flagged for behaving abnormally, strip-searched, tortured, and never seeing their families again. Something tells me that the rate of false positives on this machine will overshadow the rate of false negatives by a very large margin.
We lose more people to premature death each and every year because we have no health care than we have to terrorism in the whole of the 21st century.
fear, fear, fear, be afraid, fear, fear, be afraid.
A young girl waring a proto-board with blinking LEDs could have ben shot dead because of the hysteria.
fear, fear, fear, be afraid, fear, fear, be afraid. fear, fear, fear, be afraid, fear, fear, be afraid.
You can't say we have nothing to fear, but we have a lot of real and pressing things that need to be focused upon.
fear, fear, fear, be afraid, fear, fear, be afraid. fear, fear, fear, be afraid, fear, fear, be afraid. Threat level purple.
The U.S.A. has to re-grow our spine. We have nothing to fear but fear itself. Unfortunately, the current powers that be like to rule by exploiting and enhancing the terror of terrorists.
You are correct. From TFA:
It is absolutely ridiculous to think that they have produced any kind of test results that would indicate a functioning system. This is government and business at its absolute worst.
Not only is DHS trying their damnedest to become big brother, they are doing it in the most incompetent way possible.
This tech will never, ever work. All it can measure is physiological attributes. Correlation is not causation. Just because some percentage of people who are intending to commit a crime have certain physiological characteristics does not mean that anyone with those characteristics is a 'pre-criminal' and should be questioned. I weep for the future.
And even if, in some far-flung scenario, it did become functional it would still be illegal. It is invasion of privacy. Our thoughts and intentions are private. They mean nothing until we act on them. Human thought is vast and unlimited, part of our nature is boiling down the infinite array of ideas we have into action in the physical world where there are consequences. Everyone has the right to think whatever they want. When they act on it, then that action enters the territory of having (potentially bad) consequences.
What this evolves into is thought control and that is the end of liberty.
Thank you Dave Raggett
And then the DHLS agents can all be Commanders Braxtion, zipping through the timelines, arresting or aborting people, or arresting and coitus-interrupting the would-be parents, all stating like the Vidal Sassoon (And, THEY'LL tell two friends, and so on and so on and so on... commercial):
"I am Commander Braxton, of the DHLS Timeship Aeon. You are being arrested for crimes you WILL commit...", or,
"I am Commander Braxton, of the DHLS TimePos ICOS. You sex act is being disrupted to delay or prevent arrival of the bastard/bitch YOU MIGHT give rise to..."
So, what of a Kenyan sprinter, having lost his run, is sweating profusely, dons his sweat pants, runs to a store outside the track event, and is frustrated because he doesn't know what to do? In SOME countries, he might be assumed to be en route to a criminal activity (if the cameras and human monitors don't take into account he's a jogger...)
But, what of a hunter who takes down the helpless elk, only to watch a ranger or warden haul it away, or, worse, has some teens or (gasp, senior citizens bored with life) come along and take that elk away? But, the shooters head to town for some beers. If caught on a camera, would THEY be suspected of prepping to kill or harm anyone?
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I've stolen this from Cory Doctorow