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."

Comments

sensors...

[adpsimpson]

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?

Re:sensors...

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Why yes, yes there is. It can randomly spurt out false positives, subjecting people to random stops and questioning. It can still miss the real terrorists who are doing their damnedest to look normal and unthreatening. It can further the "show us your papers" society we've been building and seem so enamored of. It can supply the mindless thugs at security checkpoints an ironclad "the machine says so" excuse to hassle harried, irritated travelers. It can further the "security theatre" in all aspects of everyday life. In short, it can do nothing positive.

Re:sensors...

[electrictroy]

Good point. A real terrorist doesn't show signs of distress, because he doesn't consider his actions immoral. He thinks killing IS the moral thing to do.

Re:sensors...

[Otter]

...And most importantly, skin colour?

That's precisely the point of using an automated system instead of humans, to avoid accusations of racial or ethnic profiling.

Re:sensors...

[moderatorrater]

He'll still show signs of stress, though. Just because you think it's right to get into a fight doesn't mean that the adrenaline doesn't start pumping.

The real problem with this is that the number of wrongdoers is small while the pool for false positives is high. If 5% of people have some intent that should be picked up by this, then 4% of all people with ill intent will be picked up. At the rate, then they'd have to have less than a 5% rate of false positives just to reach the point where half the people it says have ill intent actually do. What are the chances that it's going to have a false positive rate less than 5%?

And that's assuming that 1/20 people have some intent that would need to be picked up by this, while the actual rate is almost certainly smaller. Millions of people fly on airplanes every year, yet every year only a handful try something stupid. This is security theater at its finest.

Re:sensors...

[Otter]

Absolutely untrue. Suicide bombers fail as often as they do (in Israel, Iraq, Sri Lanka,...) because they're usually bug-eyed, sweating, twitching, and frequently high. Highly trained operatives might be reliably calm, but the run-of-the-mill terrorist is usually pretty obvious, although they can still often kill people before someone can stop them.

Re:sensors...

[Chris Burke]

The real problem with this is that the number of wrongdoers is small while the pool for false positives is high. If 5% of people have some intent that should be picked up by this, then 4% of all people with ill intent will be picked up. At the rate, then they'd have to have less than a 5% rate of false positives just to reach the point where half the people it says have ill intent actually do. What are the chances that it's going to have a false positive rate less than 5%?

And that's assuming that 1/20 people have some intent that would need to be picked up by this, while the actual rate is almost certainly smaller. Millions of people fly on airplanes every year, yet every year only a handful try something stupid. This is security theater at its finest.

You've hit that on the head. About 200,000 people go through Chicago O'Hare, just that single (though large) airport, every day. And so far, zero terrorist attacks launched out of O'Hare. The odds that a person this machine flagged being an innocent is ridiculously high, even if it is has high specificity.

Also, aside from the raw statistics of the thing, there's another compounding factor that makes this even more useless*, which is it's rather simple for terrorists to game the system with dry runs.

Terrorist organizations already tend to use people not on our radar for attacks, so if they get pulled out of line on a dry-run, we won't have anything on them and it'll look like yet another false positive. Our young jihadi goes through the line with a bunch of his buddies, and everyone who gets pulled out of line doesn't go through the next time. Once you've discovered the group of people who aren't detected by the terrorist detector/profilers/crystal ball, the hot run can proceed with little fear of getting caught.

* For the stated goal, of course, not the goal of Security Theater for which a magical terrorist detector is great.

Re:sensors...

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

Sheesh! I've never seen a bunch of geeks so opposed to developing an immature technology before! Perhaps a toning down of the pessimism would be in order, and perhaps we may see some improvements in our understanding of human behaviour, and the programs built to understand it.

It isn't the idea of developing an immature technology that upsets people. It is our well-justified fear of the government deploying immature technology. I'd rather not be subjected to a public beta-test of a thoughtcrime detector.

Re:sensors...

[Lord Apathy]

because they're usually bug-eyed, sweating, twitching, and frequently high

Based on that alone they would be catching a lot of nerds out on the first date too.

Re:sensors...

[rtb61]

The biggest problem with this, is between 78% and 80% of people told to act suspiciously can fool the system into believing they are intending to commit crime, logically those same people should be able to act in the opposite fashion to fool the system into believing they are not, I mean really, what are they thinking the logic of their analysis represents.

Apparently excuses for legal pre-emptive arrests for unsavoury people is the new focus, much like the no fly lists. A list of politically undesirable people who will be arrested, searched, interrogated, transferred to a prison facility whilst their identities are confirmed (which I am sure will take no longer than 24 to 48 hours). All this will be done at a range of designated choke points, like train and subway stations and, maybe even toll booths.

Adjust your political alignment or you will find you, your family, your friends subject to random humiliations, violent arrests, searches including sexual groping and destruction of private property, of course your will be released and it will all be done with a masquerade of legality. I believe some journalists have already experienced exactly this type of pre-emptive arrest at the RNC convention, I don't believe they were particularly impressed with the concept.

Re:sensors...

[moderatorrater]

but using this to help narrow who to watch would be what this should be used for.

I can't disagree more strongly. When the flood the false positives start coming in, they'll quickly start dismissing them. As another poster pointed out, Chicago O'Hare alone has 200,000 people go through it every day; when several thousand of them are flagged as suspicious, you can bet that security will stop caring pretty quickly.

Re:sensors...

[Bandman]

Fair warning, you should go trademark the phrase "magical terrorist detector" before I do.

Re:sensors...

[Bandman]

Exactly. Pair this up with the red light cameras, and you've got enough income to drive any city out of recession.

"I didn't run that red light"
"No, but you wanted to"

Re:sensors...

[db32]

Actually, the real purpose is to pull out those kids who are nervous about leaving home for the first time going to college or something. That way they can scare them into not turning into one of those dirty liberal elitist intellectuals that would dare question the authority of the system.

Re:sensors...

[interstellar_donkey]

Unfortunately, sarcastic bitching is not the solution.

No, but it does make it a little easier to handle as the problem gets worse.

Re:sensors...

[cmr-denver]

Actually, better yet, don't tell them it's a dry run ahead of time. Have them go through security to be inside by a specific time. Then call them, and say "It's a go" or "Nevermind, enjoy your trip." After a couple of "Nevermind" runs and not getting pulled over, you should know who to send...

Re:sensors...

[gstoddart]

but he missed the boat on just how easy it has become (and is becoming!) to use computers to not merely threaten to monitor anybody at any time, but to monitor everybody all the time.

Given that he published it in 1949, he can be forgiven for not foreseeing modern computers.

In terms of showing how pervasive and evil a surveillance society can be, he's still highly relevant.

Pointing out just how eerie something like an automated "future crimes" concept is hardly just sarcastic bitching -- I'm betting an awful lot of people read that summary and thought "holy crap!!", I sure as hell did. Because, the sheer idea of being detained or hassled because some computer suggested you might be stressed is nuts. It's scary to think this could give them any grounds to act on anymore more than a very cursory level -- I mean, talk about your unreasonable search, and people being told they need to get the rubber glove treatment because some computer program identified them as stressed is lunacy.

Time was when one would have through it impossible for the USA to degenerate into a place where this would be happening. Now, it's hard to think of how one would stop it. Spending billions of dollars to make all of the scary stuff in Orwell come true is frightening to some of us.

Cheers

Re:sensors...

[ByOhTek]

If the terrorists know it's a dry run, then their responses will be different - amongst other things, if they are caught, there will be no evidence or deniability.

Still, I can't see this as having a low false positive rate.

- Guy goes home to his beloved but too-oft left alone wife is nervous over the obvious.
- Gal had to much to drink last night and woke up with someone... unusual. Worried about a few things that could really change her life
- [insert various nervousness-inducing-mental-conditions-here] sufferer forgot to take his/her medicine.
- First time flier.

The list can go on.

Re:sensors...

[clone53421]

I'll give that a shot...

Your post advocates a

( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) security-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting terrorism. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Terrorists can easily play the system to go unnoticed
( ) Too many legitimate travellers would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will terrorism for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Travellers will not put up with it
( ) Airlines will not put up with it
( ) The FBI will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from terrorists
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many airlines cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential customers
( ) Terrorists don't care about collateral damage
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for travel
( ) Airlines in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching body cavities
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing investment in hardware
( ) Susceptibility of means other than air travel to attack
( ) Willingness of travellers to comply with terrorist demands when faced with hostage situations
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of terrorism
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with terrorists
( ) Dishonesty on the part of terrorists themselves
( ) Operating costs that are unaffected by airplane loading
( ) Osama bin Laden

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) Toothpaste should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about bombs without being detained
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Your first bag should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your henchmen?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time visas are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

Re:sensors...

[mazarin5]

Actually, the real purpose is to pull out those kids who are nervous about leaving home for the first time going to college or something. That way they can scare them into not turning into one of those dirty liberal elitist intellectuals that would dare question the authority of the system.

Because nothing turns a kid into a conservative like a bad run-in with the cops, right?

Err

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

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.

Re:Err

[Yvanhoe]

If I recall correctly, the last time I traveled to USA, I had to fill a form stating that the intent of my travel was not to kill the US president. People who create such forms would probably fund a research on a "suspicious person detector"

Re:Err

[DriedClexler]

Yes, it does sound idiotic. My reaction was: ROFLcopter at the idea that you can successfully "tell people to act suspicious". Um, if it were possible in the first place for people to notice and control the aspects of themselves that make them look suspicious, others wouldn't be suspicious of those aspects in the first place!

Think about it: people become suspicious of others based on criteria X,Y,Z because meeting X,Y,Z reveals a higher probability of intent to cause harm. But anybody trying to cause harm will suppress any *controllable* sign that they are trying to cause harm before it's too late to stop. So the only remaining criteria people use in dermining whether they'll be suspicious of someone are those that are very difficult if not impossible to control. As a bad example: someone will only look around to see if he's being watched (which looks suspicious), if he's about to do something objectionable (like picking a lock). But he can't suppress that because then he takes the chance of someone noticing him picking the lock.

A better test would be to set up a scenario like a line at the airport where the screeners have to keep out dangerous items. Then, have a few of the participants try to smuggle items through, and get a huge reward if they succeed, while the screeners get the reward if smugglers don't succeed. Then, put a time limit on, so the screeners have to be judicious about who they check, so they only check the most suspicious. Oh, and make it double-blind as much as possible. Then, the people trying to smuggle will have the same incentive structure that real smugglers have, and thus will give off all the real-world signs of planning something objectionable.

But then, that would be too much work.

"Told to act suspicious"?

[fprintf]

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.

Not even close

[ShawnCplus]

Sorry, but 78% is not even REMOTELY accurate to consider someone dangerous. There is already a high enough false accusation rate.

Re:Not even close

[JustinOpinion]

Cory Doctorow described it nicely in his recent book "Little Brother" (free download available):

If you ever decide to do something as stupid as build an automatic terrorism detector, here's a math lesson you need to learn first. It's called "the paradox of the false positive," and it's a doozy.

Say you have a new disease, called Super-AIDS. Only one in a million people gets Super-AIDS. You develop a test for Super-AIDS that's 99 percent accurate. I mean, 99 percent of the time, it gives the correct result -- true if the subject is infected, and false if the subject is healthy. You give the test to a million people.

One in a million people have Super-AIDS. One in a hundred people that you test will generate a "false positive" -- the test will say he has Super-AIDS even though he doesn't. That's what "99 percent accurate" means: one percent wrong.

What's one percent of one million?

1,000,000/100 = 10,000

One in a million people has Super-AIDS. If you test a million random people, you'll probably only find one case of real Super-AIDS. But your test won't identify one person as having Super-AIDS. It will identify 10,000 people as having it.

Your 99 percent accurate test will perform with 99.99 percent inaccuracy.

That's the paradox of the false positive. When you try to find something really rare, your test's accuracy has to match the rarity of the thing you're looking for. If you're trying to point at a single pixel on your screen, a sharp pencil is a good pointer: the pencil-tip is a lot smaller (more accurate) than the pixels. But a pencil-tip is no good at pointing at a single atom in your screen. For that, you need a pointer -- a test -- that's one atom wide or less at the tip.

This is the paradox of the false positive, and here's how it applies to terrorism:

Terrorists are really rare. In a city of twenty million like New York, there might be one or two terrorists. Maybe ten of them at the outside. 10/20,000,000 = 0.00005 percent. One twenty-thousandth of a percent.

That's pretty rare all right. Now, say you've got some software that can sift through all the bank-records, or toll-pass records, or public transit records, or phone-call records in the city and catch terrorists 99 percent of the time.

In a pool of twenty million people, a 99 percent accurate test will identify two hundred thousand people as being terrorists. But only ten of them are terrorists. To catch ten bad guys, you have to haul in and investigate two hundred thousand innocent people.

Guess what? Terrorism tests aren't anywhere close to 99 percent accurate. More like 60 percent accurate. Even 40 percent accurate, sometimes.

What this all meant was that the Department of Homeland Security had set itself up to fail badly. They were trying to spot incredibly rare events -- a person is a terrorist -- with inaccurate systems.

Doesn't matter

[MadMidnightBomber]

"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."

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.

Government screws private sector again.

[bigtallmofo]

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?

Re:Additional Locations

[antifoidulus]

Can the sensors even handle that much mal-intent and deception?

That's brilliant!

[Minwee]

All you need to do now is post signs reminding any potential evil-doers to "act suspicious" and the system will work perfectly.

Fancy that, Burka's protect civil rights.

[tjstork]

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?

My first thought, too...

[Joce640k]

All we've got is a device which can spot normal people trying to be visibly "suspicious".

Will be fun at the airport

[dbyte]

God help the nervous flier :)

More bad statistics

[TheMeuge]

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.

Absurdities

[mlwmohawk]

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.

the end of liberty

[globaljustin]

All we've got is a device which can spot normal people trying to be visibly "suspicious".

You are correct. From TFA:

Some subjects were told to act shifty, be evasive, deceptive and hostile. And many were detected.

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.

The Paradox of the False Positive

[Chyeld]

I've stolen this from Cory Doctorow

Paradox of the false positive
Statisticians speak of something called the Paradox of the False Positive. Here's how that works: imagine that you've got a disease that strikes one in a million people, and a test for the disease that's 99% accurate. You administer the test to a million people, and it will be positive for around 10,000 of them - because for every hundred people, it will be wrong once (that's what 99% accurate means). Yet, statistically, we know that there's only one infected person in the entire sample. That means that your "99% accurate" test is wrong 9,999 times out of 10,000!

Terrorism is a lot less common than one in a million and automated "tests" for terrorism - data-mined conclusions drawn from transactions, Oyster cards, bank transfers, travel schedules, etc - are a lot less accurate than 99%. That means practically every person who is branded a terrorist by our data-mining efforts is innocent.

In other words, in the effort to find the terrorist needles in our haystacks, we're just making much bigger haystacks.

You don't get to understand the statistics of rare events by intuition. It's something that has to be learned, through formal and informal instruction. If there's one thing the government and our educational institutions could do to keep us safer, it's this: teach us how statistics works. They should drill it into us with the same vigor with which they approached convincing us that property values would rise forever, make it the subject of reality TV shows and infuse every corner of our news and politics with it. Without an adequate grasp of these concepts, no one can ever tell for sure if he or she is safe.

Re:The Paradox of the False Positive

[Chyeld]

Out of the 10,000 people indicated as having the disease, only one did. If the purpose of the test is to find those with the disease, then it's wrong 9,999 times out of 10,000 when it reports someone has it.

Our lovely machine that is currently 78% accurate on 'mal-intent' (sic) detection is going to incorrectly tag 22 people out of every 100 as having mal-intent. With the gp's quoted figure of 200,000 people traveling through O'Hare every day, that means potentially 46,000 people a day incorrectly tagged as terrorists. Not one of them actually a terrorist, just someone caught as a false positive.

One airport. One day. 46,000 people whose lives have just been screwed over in some manner. And no guarantee that the one terrorist that might show up once every billion of people is going to be caught by the machine.