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Homeland Security Department Testing "Pre-Crime" Detector

Posted by timothy on from the when-dowsing-meets-voight-kampff dept.

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."

21 of 580 comments (clear)

  1. sensors... by adpsimpson · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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."
    1. Re:sensors... by $RANDOMLUSER · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
    2. Re:sensors... by electrictroy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
    3. Re:sensors... by Otter · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
    4. Re:sensors... by Chris+Burke · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --

      The enemies of Democracy are
    5. Re:sensors... by Bandman · · Score: 5, Funny

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

      --
      Check out my sysadmin blog!
    6. Re:sensors... by Bandman · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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"

      --
      Check out my sysadmin blog!
    7. Re:sensors... by db32 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
    8. Re:sensors... by cmr-denver · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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...

    9. Re:sensors... by gstoddart · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
  2. Err by InvisblePinkUnicorn · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Err by Yvanhoe · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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"

      --
      The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
  3. "Told to act suspicious"? by fprintf · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  4. Not even close by ShawnCplus · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:Not even close by JustinOpinion · · Score: 5, Interesting
      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.

  5. Doesn't matter by MadMidnightBomber · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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.

    --
    "It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."
  6. Government screws private sector again. by bigtallmofo · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.
  7. Re:Additional Locations by antifoidulus · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    --
    Monstar L
  8. My first thought, too... by Joce640k · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    --
    No sig today...
  9. Absurdities by mlwmohawk · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  10. The Paradox of the False Positive by Chyeld · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.