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Fear Detector To Sniff Out Terrorists
Hugh Pickens writes "Evidence that the smell of fear is real was uncovered by US scientists last year who studied the underarm secretions of 20 terrified novice skydivers and found that people appear to respond unconsciously to the sweat smell of a frightened person. Now the Telegraph reports that researchers hope a 'fear detector' will make it possible to identify individuals at check points who are up to no good. 'The challenge lies in the characterization and identification of the specific chemical that gives away the signature of human fear, especially the fear in relation to criminal acts,' says Professor Tong Tun at City University London, who leads the team developing security sensor systems that can detect the human fear pheromone. The project will look at potential obstacles to the device, such as the effects of perfume and the variances in pheromone production and if the initial 18-month feasibility study is successful, the first detectors could be developed in the next two to three years. 'I do not see any particular reason why similar sensor techniques cannot be expanded to identify human smells by race, age or gender to build a profile of a criminal during or after an incident,' Tong added."
Luckily airports are only ever full of relaxed, calm people who have no fear of flying whatsoever.
And being dragged off to be interrogated as a terrorist in some darkened back-room by three of four rent-a-thugs can only serve to ease their fears of flying...
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I'd be more alarmed to find someone who wasn't afraid to pass a checkpoint like this. How can you defend yourself from the allegation of some machine saying that you exhibit fear, and therefore is a terrorist? Furthermore, sociopaths and psychopaths will have little trouble passing these checkpoints.
So you'll get plenty of false positives, and plenty of false negatives.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
The officers would only pull Arab-looking dudes, and many of those dudes might produce fear signals not because of terrorism, but because they're afraid of being treated badly at US airports like many of their brethren are.
I have been suffering on anxiety disorder now for the last 15 years, does that mean I will get an anal search every time I cross the border now?
Terrorism is a real threat, it's just nowhere near as large a threat as some would make it out to be. You're likely to be killed in a domestic terrorist attack in the same way you're likely to die of exposure in the winter: Something to be conscious of, something to keep an eye out for, something to take precautions against, but not something to live in constant fear of.
We shouldn't be hurting people with false positives, and like you, I think that a system such as described in TFA is going to have an unacceptably high false positive rate and will probably be accompanied by an unacceptably high false negative rate, but I don't agree that we should be complacent or work under the assumption that nothing's going to happen... as the sample size increases towards infinity, the probability of finding something that matches case X approaches 1, even for an extremely unlikely X... in other words, given enough time, something *will* happen. There are some seriously messed up people out there who would like nothing more than to hurt western society in some giant spectacular ball of flame. Just that most of them either don't have the means, or don't have the will to actually do something about it. We should still do what we can, within reason, to reduce the likelihood of their success. It's that "within reason" that most people seem to have lost sight of.