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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.
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.
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.
You're right! We should extend this outside of airports, so that any jumped up minimum wage gomer with a tin badge can stop anyone they like, declare Facecrime, and use that as probable cause for an invasive search up to and including internal! I'm sure that the 99% of innocents who get Probed would also agree that the payoff is worth it, whatever the cost!
Let's start with you, shall we?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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.
150k+ more people were wrongly harassed for those 1.2k arrests. Doesn't sound so good when you look at all the numebers involved.
Arrested != convicted. Oooh - someone smuggling drugs. Big national security risk there.
If this were a medical test, it would have been tossed out well before implementation based on both the false positive rate and the admission of questionable sensitivity.
You don't know how well a detector works unless you know how many cases it failed to detect a true positive (what's called a false negative in the biz). Let's say if you searched everyone in line you'd arrest 0.2% of them for some suspected crime. In that case, the 1200 in 600k means your detector is worthless. It works no better than a random sample.
Most of us want to catch people doing illegal things. Fewer and fewer of us want to prevent a police state that asks people for their papers at every turn, and performs strip searches because they smiled at the camera a little funny.
1.2K arrest for 160K control.
How many would have been arrested if 160K person had been randomly controlled instead of using that technology ?
Also how many of those person with fake id would have been catched later-on at passport control ?
Police Officer are already very good at behavior detection. Can this system be replaced by simply adding more cops in critical area ?
I'm betting if the police just randomly grabed people off the street and subjected them to everything up to cavity searches more than 1% would be found to be carrying drugs,knives longer than the legal length, fake ID's or be found to be violating some other pisant little law.
Hell if a police officers followed any random person for a single day as they went about their blameless buisness there's close to a 100% chancethat person could be caught commiting enough "crimes" to put them away for life.
It boils down to the fact that if a law enforcement official doesn't like your face he can find some ancient law you've been violating and put you away.
160.000 people were frisked and only 1.266 were found posses something they shouldn't*. That's a hit ratio of fewer than 1%.
According to Wikipedia, by the beginning of 2008, more than 1 in 100 Americans were incarcerated, so that's more than 1% "hit ratio" if you simply searched every American for illegal drugs, fake IDs or similar. Still a decent tradeoff?
*I don't see how a person carrying pot can bring down a plane, but apprently it's already possible with nail scissors, so who knows.
If you kill someone in a drunken rage or kill someone drunk driving is that the barmans fault or your own since you chose to drink?
It's your fault no matter what you're on.
The drugs are not killing your victim, you are and it's your fault if you chose to take the drugs.
So no, this is an entirely invalid point.
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
So you think performing questionable searches of 160 000 people at the airport is perfectly fine? And arresting people for infractions not related to the search based on the results? I hope not many people share your views. That kind of reasoning ends up with some very depressing scenarios very fast.
If you'd pulled over 160 000 cars and searched them on the highway on "suspicions of terrorism" you'd probably get 1200 arrests for various minor infractions as well. Or if you searched 160 000 houses, or random people on the street....
With a accuracy of less than 1% for any crime it obviously doesn't work. It can't be that much better than a random search.
---- Sig. gone.
Picking out 160.000 people at random, or based on a border guard's hunch would likely have gotten as many hits.
Sounds like a waste of money to me.
Sounds like a serious threat to civil liberties to me. The money involved is of little interest.
---- Sig. gone.
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.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8167533318153586646&hl=en
Why nobody in america should ever talk to the police. ever.No matter how innocent.
You can be a criminal for possesion of a lobster, opeing a packet of cigarettes without fully destroying the tax seal and for any number of lesser known laws.
Nobody in america is truely innocent. Everyone has broken the law at some point and almost everyone breaks the law many times a day without ever knowing.
By sharing it with the pilot.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
For the actual quote:
"Blessed is the one who grabs your little children and smashes them against a rock."
Psalm 137:9
As a matter of fact, I do have something to hide. Most people would not be happy about a complete stranger going through their underwear drawer at home, why should I feel comfortable with a complete stranger going through my underwear at an airport where everyone can see? It's embarrassing and humiliating to pat someone down in public and search through their belongings when they have done nothing wrong.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
"you have nothing to hide, right"
That idea is an extremely slippery slope, that is all too often used to extend ever more control over people. For example, one of the fundamental principles of law, is someone is innocent, until proven guilty. But by applying the idea, "you have nothing to hide", it means anyone suspected (in this case, by automated profiling) of being a criminal, now needs to prove they are innocent. It means if you are a false positive, then you will be stopped from what you are doing and interrogated and even your house and belongings can be searched, until you can prove you are innocent. While all this is happening, you will also have no privacy at all and your freedom is removed from you while you prove you are innocent.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innocent_until_proven_guilty
So over time, as they add ever more automated profiling, they get ever more ways to get more people caught up as false positives. That's ever more people, being deprived of freedom, until they can prove their innocence.
The route to a totalitarian society, is via people using the idea of, "you have nothing to hide". Yet ironically, all too often, its the minority of people who have power in (ever more) totalitarian style societies, that are able to cause the greatest injustices to their powerless minions. They cause their harm through multiple means. Some are self-righteously ignorant of the harm they cause. Others deliberately seek to exploit their position of power, for their own gain.
The real danger is this minority of people (in ever country) who seek to dominate and control others. This applies to people who seek political or business power over people and ironically terrorists also seek to dominate and control others, into their twisted points of view, for their groups gain. In the case of the terrorists the gain they seek is for their own side, (even if their lower foot soldiers don't gain) as they see it as a battle for their point of view. In the case of political or business power, the gain is directly for them.
The majority of us who don't seek power over others, are simply caught up in an endless power struggle, throughout history between different minority groups, who do seek power and so seek to get others on their side, to boost their own power and to overthrow the other power seeking groups.
Therefore, "you have nothing to hide", is wrong. Everyone has something to hind from some of these groups, who seek power. Because some of the groups will use anything they learn to gain power over people and the more extreme they push towards a totalitarian controlled society, the more they can exploit, stop, search, detain or interrogate, you and your family. That's not the kind of world I want to live in. Plus once these laws are passed, they can be used by any new party getting into power later on. Imagine what power some more extreme groups would do, if they gained access to this kind of power in the future.
For example, in the UK, http://www.independent.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00065/cartoon291008_65504a.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacqui_Smith "As the UK Home Secretary, she has been noted for advocating strongly authoritarian policies."
"Authoritarian", in her case, as in extremely arrogant, self-righteous, self-serving, power seeking, contempt for the views of others. She is a great example of how power corrupts and she is dragging the whole UK into her own total police state hell.
For example, in the UK, even some companies can legally break into peoples homes.
http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/consumer/bills/article.html?in_article_id=427634&in_page_id=510
That
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
Simplistically, this psalm expresses grief and revenge by those who had been captured by the Babylonians.
(And "blessed" means "happy", not "God condones this and will bless you")
Looking into it more, though, I learned of a larger historical context (Taken from here):
"It is important to remember that the curses of Psalm 137 are not originally the psalmistâ(TM)s curses. They are the Lordâ(TM)s curses which the psalmist has made his own. The destruction of Edom was the fulfillment of prophecy, particularly the prophecy of Obadiah. In Isaiah 13:16, which was written about 200 years before Babylonâ(TM)s fall, the destruction of Babylon was prophesied in almost the exact terms used in Psalm 137. The destruction of the children who were too young to be transported into slavery was a common practice in ancient warfare. Since this cruelty was apparently practiced by the Babylonians during their campaigns of conquest against Israel, Babylon would receive from its Persian and Median conquerors the same treatment which it had inflicted on Israel (Jeremiah 50:29; 51:56). "
And this problem is only going to get worse with time, as more and more stupid laws are added to the books. Passing a dumb law is relatively easy, all you need is one extraordinary event ('preferably' involving a child) to make it into the mainstream media and you can pass a law against some aspect involved in that event. Getting useless or stupid laws repealed afterward is much harder.
Personally I think every new law should come under review every 5 years to a) judge its effectiveness in reducing whatever it is it was meant to reduce, b) re-assess its applicability in light of new developments (whether that be technological, court rulings, false positives etc) and c) gauge public opinion about whether this law is still necessary. It's a lot to ask for sure, but then again passing a new law is a big deal, or at least it should be.
Without some kind of review process like this the law books will just get thicker and thicker, until it becomes impossible to live a normal life without breaking some law every day. I'd argue we've already reached that point.
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
Police are not here to protect you, nor do they have to. See Warren v DC, or a whole slue (sp?) of cases from the supreme court. The police are there to enforce laws after the fact, and that is their ONLY duty.
problem: your solution gets very very heavy over time.
How about this: 1 year after a law comes in it has to be reviewed, then 2 years after that, then 4 years after that, then 8 years after that etc etc etc.
a law which has stood for 100 years without being repealed or edited is probably pretty solid.
A law which was passed in the heat of the moment is probably useless.
this has the advantage that even with a lot of laws the weight of re-testing them gets less over time.
Nah, he'd just fly really slow with the windows down.
Oh, I see your point.
"The cup is in turn designed for holding hot or cold liquids, and has an open rim and closed base." --US Patent #5425497
I have argue this for some time. If you want to prove to someone that our laws are already impossible for average citizens to know, just have them talk about what is legal and illegal in front of lawyers. They will quickly be told that not only do they not know what they are talking about, but they will also be told that the words used in laws have different definition than the same words used by the general population.
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.
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