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Fewer Than 1% Arrested From TSA's "Behavior Detection"
An anonymous reader writes "Fewer than 1% of airline passengers singled out at airports using the much vaunted 'suspicious behavior detection' techniques are arrested, Transportation Security Administration figures show. The TSA program, launched in early 2006, looks for terrorists using a controversial surveillance method based on behavior detection and has led to more than 160,000 people in airports receiving scrutiny, such as a pat-down search or a brief interview. It has resulted in only 1,266 arrests, often on charges of carrying drugs or fake IDs, the TSA said. The TSA has not publicly said whether it has caught a terrorist through the program." In related news, the odds of sanity coming to the TSA plummeted today when Schneier said he's not interested in the top job there.
Not all flying things are ducks.
ONLY 1.2k were actually arrested? Is anyone else amazed at the amount of people 1.2k is? Okay, you're right, it didn't find Osama Bin Laden. But it did help find OVER 1200 people trying to smuggle drugs or fake IDs. That sounds like a decent payoff to me.
If you were convinced that you were morally right and upholding 'God's Law' would you really act suspiciously? Those who act suspicious know what they are doing is wrong.
Terrorism is a different animal all together from faking IDs and drug carrying.
TSA considers praying towards mecca 'suspicious behaviour'
If you read TFA you'll see how onerous the vetting process has become for *any* potential appointee (or any Federal employee for that matter). It's no wonder Schneier isn't interested. However, I see this as a positive thing. Since the vetting process is getting even more microscopic in examining applicants there soon won't be ANYBODY in the country who will be able to pass muster. The end result will be a natural shrinking of the Federal government due to a lack of "qualified" (read "sterile") applicants. Us Libertarians may win by default!
How does that figure compare to random searches? Without that figure for comparison it's completely pointless saying "OMGZ TSA FAIL" because nobody ever claimed that everyone stopped would be arrested. If it gets higher arrests than random searches what's the problem?
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
The TSA has not publicly said whether it has caught a terrorist through the program
Of course not - That would presume the TSA (and DHS in general) actually has the goal of stopping terrorists.
Don't make the mistake of taking their name and stated goals literally. The DHS exists solely for the purpose of keeping the US populace in fear, making us easier to control and more tolerant of increasingly draconian laws relating to "security". For proof, you need look no further than how well FEMA (once an actually useful agency) has handled various disasters since they got sucked into the DHS... Or for that matter, the TSA's record at catching weapons carried by various reporters.
The second amendment grows increasingly relevant to our society every day... And not for protection from dark-skinned foreigners, but the real "terrorists" running our country and our world.
It may not be very effective, but it's way more politically correct than their old arrest strategy, "if he's brown, take him down"
How many people that get pulled out of the metal detector line actually get arrested? Its the same basic idea as this system, see a sensor reading that potentially represents something harmful, pull them out of line, check to see what's going on, keep going.
they would be correct. It is right not to trust someone who would sanction the expulsion of a rape victim from her community, or gouging out a woman's clitoris in the name of purity, or intentionally target civilians because they disagree with their government. Muslims have given the rest of the world plenty of reason to be suspicious through their childish responses to every perceived slight.
How did this happen? Who's to blame? Well, certainly there are those more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable, but again truth be told, if you're looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
This is just another case of statistics being used to try to manipulate the story. Saying that this detection method only managed about a 1% arrest rate is meaningless unless we also know what the arrest rate was with previous / other methods. If other methods were only achieving 0.1% then this is fantastic improvement.
On a more personal note though I think any technique that can only manage a 1% success rate probably needs scrapping. There are obviously far to many false positives for the system to be trusted and of course you can't count the number of false negatives. The fact that it was specifically brought into catch terrorists and it would seem it hasn't succeeded speaks even worse of it (I imagine if they had caught a terrorist they would be shouting it from the roof tops).
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
Oh - I know what's different: no "Bush Worse Than Hitler" diatribes.
Don't you feel like idiots now that your man has won a fair election?
No? You should.
Because you are idiots.
The summary used a lot of words to say it doesn't work. Not that they'll stop using it unless they are made to. Honestly, all this 'using a Buick to swat a fly nonsense has to end sometime.
The thing is, if you know your entering a country that starts off on the assumption your probably a terrorist, that doesn't make people relax.
Personally I find airports immensely stressful, seriously so, to the point that I take the train if at all possible. Flying is bearable, but all that waiting around in the airport buying overpriced coffee and getting 'approved as terror free' is a deeply unpleasant experience.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
99% of people flag by detector, innocent, harassed.
That's what the title should read.
McCarthyism resulted in less than 1% of the citizens of Hollywood being blacklisted from the movie industry (on hearsay and specious evidence). So that was OK, then?
Numbers don't matter. Justice matters. What ever happened to "probable cause?"
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
I'd bet if you picked 100 people up you would get more than 2 arrests.
With other methods id bet I'd be willing to bet that this is pritty bad by average stats.
The fact that less than 1% of the people caught were doing something illegal would make sense if we can assume that the vast majority of the people flying are not criminals.
Let say that the detector was accurate 90% of the time, and 5% of the people who passed through the airport were doing something illegal. If one million people came through that airport, we could assume that:
1,000,000 people
50,000 criminals
- 45,000 detected
- 5,000 not detected
950,000 innocent people
-855,000 not flagged
- 95,000 falsely accused
140,000 people accused
- 67.8% are innocent
- 32.1% are guilty
Granted this is just a hypothetical situation, not based on actual statistics, but the example shows how that even a reasonably accurate system can look unreliable when searching for a needle in a haystack.
Of course issues of fairness and privacy are something else entirely is another issue entirely.
How many of the people that should have been arrested were not? For all I know using this system makes things LESS safer, because now more people pass that would have been arrested otherwise.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Have there been any terrorist attacks? No. So they couldn't have stopped actual terrorists "in the act", because there haven't been any.
To judge whether 1% is actually decent, we'd need to know what percentage of *all travelers* are guilty of the offenses they're arresting the 1% for. If the number for all travelers is, say, 0.001%, then 1% is fairly significant.
You should all move to Montana. The police here will only pull you over when driving with a broken tail light on your car. The rest of the time, you're allowed to live your life they way you want... so long as you don't hurt anyone. You all must be living in fear because of what you do.
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This is talking about the false positive rate. Shouldn't we be more concerned with the false negative rate?
The airport is not a pseudo-public place. It IS a public place. It's mandated that the government be able to enforce TSA on them. After all, they can't demand that you put TSA agents in your home (isn't that against the constitution?) because it is a private place. Yet, the public DO get in. Neighbours, the TV repair man, police, etc.
And your car is not a private place either, nor is it a public place, so it would fall under "pseudo-public" too, if that made any bloody difference.
If the government told you your children were enemies of the state, you would kill them no questions?
Remember:
All americans are not indiginous.
Koresh was an American.
So was the Unabomber
And other US terrorists, who were enemies of the state.
The UK bombers were UK residents, proving that being born in a country doesn't mean you cannot be an enemy.
You don't know what your kids get up to 100% of the time, so they could be being subverted into muslim faith and told not to tell you because you would kill any asian muslims and may kill white ones too.
So, you don't know they AREN'T enemies of the state, the fact of them being born in the country doesn't make it impossible and the US government know vastly more about the situation than you because they have special agents looking into these things.
And they tell you your children are enemies of the state.
Do you kill them?
hopefully the 1% that were arrested were higher on their suspicion meter, and they can just change the threshold for who gets chosen.
but, they could just as well have it target more people >_>
Man, I wish they were doing something so useful with Buick.
--- Do you believe in the day?
120000 were suspected, 1200 arrested, 118800 were FALSE POSITIVE and released. It could evry well be that a random pick get a better results, depending on how many in total were looked at and "not suspected".
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You raise a good point about lack of evidence not being evidence, but it's not relevant to the point GP raised at all.
How many terrorists intending to carry out an attack were caught by the system? We don't know. Let's assume the worst and say zero.
How many terrorists intending to carry out an attack weren't caught by the system? Zero, unless there's really a large number of terrorists chickening out.
So under this situation there is absolutely no way to evaluate the effectiveness of the program. There's just not enough data on terrorist attack attempts. Sure we have a lot of data on how many false positives the system can generate now, but there's no way to know what benefit we're getting for that cost.
THAT was what the GP meant by a lack of attacks, and that's what you missed thoroughly.
Because this program was supposed to find terrorists, not people with fake IDs or people trying to sneak a couple of ounces through security.
You are trying to redefine the actual goals of the program so you can paint it as a failure.
In reality, they are very happy arresting people for other things (like a few ounces of coke, or guns, or whatever) even if they are not terrorists.
I'd love to hear your alternate proposal for how to offer some security for airline travel that makes MORE sense than simply checking out people who exhibit a number of behavioral clues that something is up. To me it seems the smartest way to go because you avoid racial profiling. It also seems smarter than security checks with xrays where you can get all kinds of things past the screeners.
But then, as much as I'd like to get rid of the screeners I remember that defense in depth is the best approach. Sure a lot of that is security theatre, but behavioral profiling is much less so than many other things done.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Not necessarily. Most people look worried while walking through a security check
Behavioral profiling is way more than looking at someone to see if they appear "worried". It's using a lot of unconscious behaviors that show people are hiding something, not just that they are upset.
I guess we should drop it and instead just pull aside anyone wearing a turban? That sure sounds like a better plan...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
when I'm on holiday, I don't appreciate being fingerprinted and photographed by people with guns.
I'd expect it in Libya, but not a 'free' country. I recently went on holiday to new Zealand. On the stopover in the USA I got the fingerprint treatment, and made to feel like a prisoner, despite the fact I didn't even leave the single room in the airport for transit passengers whose plane is refuelling.
That stopover was a wonderful marketing opportunity for the USA to say "Come to the USA! Spend your tourist money here! Enjoy the USA!"
Instead, it felt like a prison visit.
When i got to NZ, they didn't fingerprint me or photograph me at all.
Based on this, I'll go on holiday to NZ again to relax, but not to the US. The US just lost my tourism cash. Nice work guys.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
In that case, the 1200 in 600k means your detector is worthless. It works no better than a random sample.
If you only look at the outcome then your point is valid.
However you ignore the human factor of the people being given extra scrutiny. The random sample subjects everyone equally to the same examination. Behavioral examination allows for a layered approach to examination, and furthermore always bypasses most frequent travelers that are just trying to go from one place to another.
It's also of course, better than racial profiling which is inherently stupid if you are actually trying to catch someone doing something you want to prevent.
Now if you could say with certainty that a random sample would yield significantly better arrest rates, then I might be more inclined to agree. That would seem to be to be the general security screening which is essentially random, although even there you have to ask if the behavioral profiling is done either before or after the screeners cherry-pick the easy targets.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
- Ayn Rand, "Atlas Shrugged"
...can't even agree much of the time on these points.
You have some who are very expansive in their use of language to the point that nearly any law can cover any activity, and then you have others who are so narrow in their use that nearly every law is almost impossible to violate.
The issue is that right now, if you investigate anyone deeply enough, you can find something they have done that violated some law or regulation.
Really, if you take an honest look at the situation, it sure seems that all of the different "interpretations" are really just attempts to evade the actual law and instead have the system arbitrarilly act in the interest of whichever "side" finds it inconvenient.
The strategy is to obfuscate what the laws actually say with a blizzard of words, assumptions, court precidents, rationalizations, and reasonings until the real meaning is lost to a maze of confusion.
Really, the big issue is that our current body of law is so huge and often self-contradictory that nobody can really be sure of whether many daily acts are legal or not.
Maybe the entire thing just needs a reboot where we scrap everything but the Constitution and start over.
Uhhhh I'd say 1% in this case validates its use. Uh duh. Even 0.5% is enough in my opinion as long as civil liberties aren't being violated.
Apparently any kind of facial hair will draw suspicion. I have yet to fly without being detained/questioned and I believe its because of my sideburns. It makes me look different than everyone else and different = suspicious. Even when traveling with my wife.
Last friday.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Unlike some of you, I squander a lot of my valuable TV time, observing wild animals eking out their last days on this planet. The shore of the river is a good place for this. Notify DHS.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
I don't think nearly as much of Schneier as many of my peers do, simply because I saw him talk and while he said some very true things, he also said some patently dumb things.
I think he's got the right idea on a lot of what's wrong, right now, but that doesn't make him a panacea.
That said, my respect for him drops more with this statement. Not because he's wrong about the TSA, but because if offered a chance to serve, he'll decline. If the president asked me to head an agency, and I thought I could do it at all, I'd jump at it.
His excuse is that he wouldn't be able to head the agency and downsize it is ludicrous. Many people work as the head of companies and downsize them. He could accomplish the real goal of safe transportation without spending as much.
So his excuse is just that. He's making plenty of money and can't fail where he is. He puts his pocketbook ahead of the liberties and happiness and safety of millions of his fellow citizens.
Great guy.
All we'd have to do to find this out is stop a bunch of randomly chosen passengers. A well-designed control group would tell us how well this thing worked.
That would be a very easy study to do. Why haven't they done it, then?
It's possible that 2% were carrying for all we know. Maybe this thing is an innocence detector.
Real numbers are a risk. Best to stay with the unknown.
If 'behviour detection' (dare we not say PROFILING!) was used, this is the usual outcome. Most criminals (away from the airports) don't get caught by an 'Ah-ha!' moment in the crime lab, but rather assessing someone who 'seems nervous' and asking questions. It's as common in law enforcement as uniforms and badges, and it's because it works.
The airport/airplane system with the biggest threats in the world, el-Al, uses this exact process. When you pick every N-th person out of line, how's that going to find anyone? A lot of the TSA processes (like using names, alone) don't make a lot of sense. But "Profiling" actually does. Not just everyone of a skin color, or everyone with a beard, but by behavioural attributes.
Why anyone would think this kind of 'profiling' could be wrong escapes me; it effective, it bothers few innocents, and gets results.
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
Despite all the safeguards supposedly in place, if a cop really wants to, he can find a reason to arrest you. Most understand it'd be pointless, and they have better things to do. But the point is, an arrest in and of itself means nothing. Making it stick in court is something else entirely.
And now, empowered with the excuse of "the behavior machine thinger said he was acting suspicious!" the cop doesn't even need to look that hard for a reason. The machine beeps or whatever it does, he slaps the cuffs on you. "Just doin' my job," he might say -- and he's probably right.
But if the charges are dropped or you aren't convicted, is the TSA going to announce that? "We arrested over a thousand people but only a hundred of them were actually up to no good."
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
If they arrest a high percentage of people - they are using Orwellian tech to implement fascism - look at all the people arrested!
If they arrest a low percentage of people - they are incompetent and are using technology to harass a lot of innocent people - look at how many aren't even arrested!
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
"I hope you die a miserable death."
nice one AC.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
So as an Undergrad Psych student, I took a class called Deception, Brain and Behavior with a noted expert in the field, Travis Seymour.
We went over the so called Micro-expression system developed by Paul Ekman, who helped create the TSA system, known as SPOT.
Some notes: Ekman's system depends on expressions occuring in 1/15th of a second. Trained observers who worked with Ekman for years still disagree on expressions, even when using slowed down film from high speed cameras.
And as best as I can find, the TSA does 7 days of training to use it, 4 in class and 3 on the job.
Oh and Ekman himself thinks the current SPOT system sucks, though that may just be covering his ass because he helped develop it.
http://www.santacruzbynight.com/index.shtml Santa Cruz By Night Vampire Larp
If it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, 99% of the time it probably isn't a duck at all.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
AntiHero says: Screw (F*CK*) TSA. TSA sucks. We have a fake economy where criminals swindle the american taxpayer out of our money through fraudulent practices (bad loaning, derivatives, interest, inflation, etc.) And we have the Criminal War Pigs that got us into illegal wars based on lies with no way out of with no objectives for winning and no proof/evidence for us even to be there in the first place, undeclared phoney wars with no purpose.
Screw TSA, screw the bush Administration, screw the wallstreet crooks, and screw the Obamanites when they figure out Obama is the same as the whole lot of 'em. Peace.
We could make some sort of trigger lock that has to be opened before the gun can fire.
I mentioned one - a retention holster. Police use them all the time. They use a number of 'retention' IE 'you can't pull it out if you don't know what you're doing'. Fingerprint or RFID would be a new twist. but eh.
As for time, we can easily leave it on a dead-man's switch. Make the gun free to use, as long as it hasn't been removed from contact with the sky marshal. You can open the lock without a fingerprint if the lock has remained within a foot of an RFID worn on his waist or one worn on his wrist.
Now you're getting into territory of 'solution looking for a problem' than 'problem looking for a solution'. Aside from an Air Marshal that deserves to be fired for leaving her weapon in the bathroom twice, retention hasn't been a problem. It's not normally a problem for police or CCW holders.
Frankly speaking, your gun is the best defense against having your gun taken away and used on yourself or somebody else. Making it harder to use initially is only asking for trouble.
And a ten minute time limit would easily allow me to shoot through all the ready magazines an officer is normally going to carry (one in the gun, two to four reloads).
And, just as relevantly, you don't put the sky marshal out where people could wander by and grab his gun.
Don't ID the marshal to everyone, don't have the marshal have his gun out where everybody can see it, train him on retention. Far cheaper and more effective than a RFID ring or bracelet that can be taken, or a biometric scanner prone to false negatives and plain taking too much time. Cheap trick - a reseting grip safety. You release the grip, the safety pops on.
I think that it's telling that in every state that's proposed 'smart' guns that won't fire except for an ID'd user the police lobbied long and hard to win exemptions to the very same rules. Yet more police are killed by their own gun than civilians(discounting 'joint' guns and suicide).
As for bailiffs - I hate to say it, but the last rampage committed against a bailiff that I've heard about was done to one old enough to draw social security. I've known some tough old guys, but this guy wasn't.
I don't read AC A human right
ASPD is recognized as a disease by WHO
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASPD
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
An effect tending to limit the total number of laws is a benefit, not a drawback. Better fewer, simpler, wiser laws that apply correctly to ever-broadening human experience than an ever-broadening mass of special-case rules for the each hot topic over the course of history.
Not that it's easy. All communication seems to be harder to get right tersely than verbosely. Surely legal code must be one of the hardest cases of this problem.
but apparently not when collectivism is desired and marketed by the powerful to enhance their own power.
I understand the point, but I disagree with the extent to which we've gone and the purity of motivation you assume on the parts of our beloved leaders. A nation whose government cannot follow its own laws or constitution will not remain a nation of laws for long.
I think our society was far more open at the begining of this decade when one had reasonable confidence that the government wasn't spying on and abducting Americans without a warrant. I think our society was far more open when in the 90s I could drive past the white house. I think our society was far more open in the 80s when I could get on a plane without showing ID. I think it was far more open in my mother's childhood when one could take a picnic on the white house lawn.
These things seem to me to be increasing in severity as we fall further down that slippery slope. One would have thought we'd have learned this lesson with greater durability from J. Edgar Hoover and McCarthy's time. Instead we've leaders who actively throw that lesson under the bus for expediency's sake.
One of my favorites was Elliot Spitzer being caught for fraud, etc. in a surveillance program he authorized for terrorism. An authorization that at the time we were promised was only for terrorism and wouldn't be used for anything less "critically" threatening.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
We aren't interested in statistical studies of colored balls in a jar.
Real-world techniques are being used to effectively deter the attacks. The Constitution is not a suicide pact.
It would make planes the holy grail of bombability - walk on with a couple of lbs of explosives and be guaranteed a 200+ kill on the plane and maybe 100s more on the ground if you time it right. Are you seriously suggesting that is acceptable because you believe you mustn't be searched even when getting on someone else's private property as a privilege?"
Absolutely, free men are never to be searched without great cause. I stand in awesome company when I say this. You think Washington, Franklin or Jefferson would have put up with the TSA for even a second?
First off, travel is not a privilige. It's a guaranteed right as the courts have affirmed on numerous ocassions. If you're not free to move around, you're not free to do anything. Secondly, the minute you open a public business, you give up your "private property" rights. I can bar someone from my home just because I don't like they way they look. I can't do the same from my business.
But forget the details, here's your real problem. You're afraid. Someone could do something bad that could hurt a lot of people, and because of that fear, you think we should toss our liberty out the window and hope the big strong men in suits and uniforms protect us.
Patrick Henry disagrees with you.
Here's your problem. You're posting on a board filled with engineers. I'll bet at least half of the people on this board could wreak some real havoc. It takes brilliance to create something new, but any jackass can rip something apart. Destruction is easy. "But, but, you could take a bomb and kill a couple hundred people..." Sure, but that's true of any large gathering of people.
Freedom and Liberty are not safe. They're never going to be safe. There's no way to make them safe. You could spend a year coming up with the most air-tight security you can imagine, and the denizens of Slashdot would pop it almost immediately. Go back and read Feynman again. The military would come up with the best schemes they could. Feynman would have them ripping their hair out by lunch.
Consider the history. A mental patient with a fixation on a Hollywood starlet managed to get a bullet past the best bodyguard service ever. The whole Union Army couldn't keep a flaky actor from killing one of our greatest presidents. Consider Iraq. We've put Draconian security measures in place, complete with "If in doubt, shoot" orders. We're still losing men to half-assed mouthbreathers who lack the balls to let their women speak their mind.
You can be Free, or you can be Fearful, but you can't be both at the same time. Yes, the man next to you could be a suicide bomber. No, you don't get to cancel his Liberty to check. Yes, your waiter might be carrying SARS. No, you don't get to force him to pass medical quarantine every morning.
We're Americans. People should speak their minds without fear as befits free men. Pray to whatever god you believe in, or deny whatever deity you choose. We don't search people until we can convince a judge that they've already done something wrong.
And the fact that some of my fellow countrymen haven't soaked this lesson down to their very bones just terrifies me...
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
3 out of 4 times I aero-travel in US, I was the selectee for pat-down search.
The 1st time I'm very co-operative, but the later ones come annoying.
BTW, I'm from China.
Actually, I'm from a military family with generations of service and a couple at the bottom of the Pacific. Yes, I've actually been shot at. It's no fun at all.
Not that I'm posting AC, of course. :-)
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."