Slashdot Mirror
The Men Who Stare At Airline Passengers, Coming To the UK
An anonymous reader writes, "The Economist's Gulliver reports on a story in Nature that questions the current airport security regimen," excerpting: "Over the past four years, some 3,000 officers in America's Transportation Security Administration (TSA) have been specially trained to spot potential terrorists at airports. The programme, known as SPOT, for Screening Passengers by Observation Technique, is intended to allow airport security officers to use tiny facial cues to identify people who are acting suspiciously. The British government is currently launching a new screening regime modelled on the Americans' SPOT. There's just one problem with all this: there's no evidence that SPOT is actually effective. The whole thing is mostly based on pseudoscience, Sharon Weinberger reports in Nature."
Happily, Nature's original article is available in full, rather than paywalled.
Chalk it up as a boondoggle and consider it part of the economic recovery plan.
There's just one problem with all this: there's no evidence that SPOT is actually effective.
And this matters to airport security because?
Look! An Arab! Go gettem!
Not effective? How is that different from any other aspect of the American airline security policy?
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
That's not a problem, it's a solution. It means there need to be more studies, and bigger contracts, to figure out which bits of SPOT do work (read: "none, but who cares if it works as long as we can keep getting funding"), until such time as the political winds shift in favor of some other crackpot in the bureaucracy who's got more money to spend than brains to care about what it's being spent on.
Meanwhile, life once again imitates art:
Without giving away a spoiler to a movie that's 28 years old, Gant's papers were in order: the KGB goon was bluffing, trying to provoke a reaction.
Every time I travel by air, I watch the first half of Firefox, and every year, the part where Clint Eastwoodfails to bluff his way through Moscow's airport seems a bit less like an American director's 1982 portrayal of the USSR, and feels a little more like home. Problem is, there's nowhere left to fly to, even if you did get your hands on a Mach-5 capable thought-controlled stealth plane.
from January 2006 through to November 2009, behaviour-detection officers referred more than 232,000 people for secondary screening, which involves closer inspection of bags and testing for explosives. 1,710 were arrested. Those arrests are overwhelmingly for criminal activities, such as outstanding warrants, completely unrelated to terrorism. The program has never resulted in the arrest of anyone who is a terrorist, or who was planning to engage in terrorist-related activity.
Shut it down!! This is an incredible waste of passenger time and taxpayer money. I wonder where they got those numbers from.. I'd love to see more numbers.. like how many actual terrorist arrests there have been for all passengers screened.
How we know is more important than what we know.
there's no evidence that SPOT is actually effective.
Seems it works pretty go for El Al.
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23795196-heathrow-staff-taught-new-way-to-spot-a-plane-bombers.do
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
airport security officers ... use tiny facial cues to identify people who are acting suspiciously.
For example, the facial cue of being Arabic.
I've got a bad feeling about this.
Better known as 318230.
Anyone who is that good at reading people,
has a better job than TSA screener.
expandfairuse.org
Great, now all the terrorists will be getting botox to make themselves look expressionless.
"Was it a millionaire who said 'Imagine No Posessions?'" -- Elvis Costello
From the title, I was expecting it to be psychically trained TSA agents.
I did a visual patdown.
Just one problem? This system is like parapsychology clairvoyance crossed with plain old applied gut-instinct prejudice. These SPOT crews are using humans in a pyscological 'sniffer dog' role. Sniffer dogs cannot be called to testify, and can be trained to 'find' things anywhere. The only upside seems to be as a redundant fail-safe system that might be a little independant from tech.
Waiting for the other shoe to...
Jiiiii~
When it comes to matters of the government, pseudoscience is the best kind of science!
So, this is basically the same thing that the premise of the show "Lie to Me" is based on. Intriguing.
The thing is, there are a VERY small number of actual terrorists. How do you know if there were even any terrorist attempts during the sampling period?
But catching 1710 criminals is meaningful, for the slight inconvenience the others faced. What's wrong with catching criminals? Aren't terrorists criminals too?
It's absurd to complain about any one security feature not being 100% effective, when defense is depth is always the best approach and this program seems to have caught more criminals that doing nothing at all would have.
What you really need is a truly random selection, and figures for how many criminals were caught that way to see if what they are doing is making a statistical difference from truly random additional screening.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
As we know from hacking DRM and many other things, there is no 100% secure system. There is only a question how much effort someone puts in succeeding to break it.
I guess any successful attempt from keeping idiots from blowing up an airplane is worth the money, specially because those who spend the money want to avoid the embarrassment to have someone to do something, and afterwards all the people who saw this person say "We all saw him. He was very suspicious."
Of course this is not necessarily effective. But it's the same security why we ask people to present a CV. If the guy you hired screws up big time, you can still say "But he had a PhD from Harvard!".
Of course all of this does not help you spot that someone is incapable/evil/criminal , but you have an excuse that you did what you could to prevent whatever bad happened.
no sig
The government can regain money through taxation. The violation of a civil liberty is a loss that cannot be regained.
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
coming into the airport, i had a lot of crap in my carry on, so i decided to reorganize on a bench just inside the airport on a bench by a trash can. at one point i even reached into the garbage can and retrieved something out i had just chucked that i had a second thought about. some little vials and stuff: the freebie ointments and lotions and crap you get in hotels
i was very much hung over, miserable, unshaven and unwashed. my facial expressions were grim. at long last after my strange behavior over the trash can, i decided to furtively move into a corner and twiddle under my clothes: i was applying deodorant, but if someone was looking at me through a security camera, i can imagine where their imagination might have gone
long story short, when i got the screening area, 3 guys eyeballing the whole time i was in line called me over to a special room. the other passengers looked at me like i was a osama himself. i started laughing, because i kind of figured out why i was being singled out, but i don't think sudden laughtewr helped in the suspicion department. they gave ma a thorough screening, asked a lot of questions, asked some of them again later (consistency?), and sent me on my way. they even had dogs sniffing around. i guess maybe i profiled more as drug mule?
who knows. regardless, flying sucks
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Seeing as US and Iraqi troops use forked sticks to "detect" bombs at roadstops in Iraq (with disastrous results), SPOT seems pretty normal.
And now I'm even thinking that they hunt Bin Laden with pendulums over maps of Pakistan!
Stupid Procedures for Opressing Travelers
Have gnu, will travel.
So Ekman's claim is that the emotions involved in a high-stakes lie cause facial tics that are almost impossible to control. Why don't Ekman and his trainees to begin entering high-stakes poker tournaments and put their lie detecting money where their mouth is?
The editor mentioned that the Nature article for this news item was not paywalled. It is worth noting that this is the case because this is a Nature news article, not a Nature research article. Had this been original research it would have still be paywalled.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
They're the rentacops of the airports except they actually have authority.
'Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.' - Mao Tse-tung
So if you guys are so fucking smart, why don't you join the TSA and change things?
I get stopped EVERY FUCKING TIME you know why?
Because I have a beard.
I have no other distinctive features, I am caucasian and pale but I have a beard.
So they make the assumption bear=terrorist=mustbestopped.
And I do not even give a shit about the UK other than being in transit there.
It certainly help everybody get better liar.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
And i would like to know how many criminal random sampling (what existed before) did catch. Because if you catch 0.7% criminal with SPOT, you HAVE to compare agaisnt random sampling. If random sampling catch 1.2% (made up number) then SPOT is *WORST* than random sampling. Giving a number in absolute without comparison is useless, and probably misleading.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Read the (unmoderated!) comments at the end of the Nature report and weep into your SuperSize Coca-Cola, you obese, ignorant Slashdot halfwits!
more jobs.
When you have access to virtually unlimited budget and manpower, you have to be creative when coming up with new ways to expand your empire. I think homeland security in the U.S. and the U.K. would be much more efficient and quite possibly more effective if we cut their budget by 50%.
The last two times that I've come back to Canada from abroad, I've been searched. The first time I came back from a week long vacation trip to Japan and the other time was from a trip from Vegas. The Japan incident was probably triggered because I was travelling alone and I did not have any relatives in Japan. I did not realize that being a tourist was now considered suspicious. Go figure. The second time I got stopped because they said that their "computer" said that I was over the limit for purchases when I was clearly not and I paid cash for everything so they had to be "guessing" based on a scan of my luggage. They tell you to store your jewellery in your carry one luggage but then they questioned me on where I got each item from. I had receipts to prove everything that I bought in Vegas. I guess that I've learned my lesson to only take jewellery that I intend to wear on the plane after getting through security.
The ironic thing is that I my job often involves working with various government around the world to detect illegal activity.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
From the fine article:
And:
But he's opposed to anyone actually trying to test SPOT scientifically. That would be "totally bogus,"
You have got to be kidding me.
This is the new phrenology.
I'll state his real reason for avoiding peer review, it's taken from the above quote:
He says he now avoids peer-reviewed journals because they're read closely by scientists
Soon, someone is going to revive the phlogiston theory of fire.
--
BMO
If the stats in the article are correct (.5% of those selected for screening are arrested), then chances are "psychics" could do as well.
Tweet, tweet.
I wonder how many would identify each other as "suspicious"? I would consider a person watching me closely enough to detect "tiny facial cues" to be behaving suspiciously.
Can't we give these people shovels, and half dig holes, while the others fill the holes in? As it is, this employment scheme is messing the lives of innocent (and productive) people. It doesn't just make a zero contribution, it makes a negative contribution.
Nice if a security system worked, but what matters also for deterrence is whether bad guys *think* it works. So, thanks a bundle for debunking stuff that might deter.
The laugh is terrorist organisations know about SPOT and train what is called "clean skins" to get past all this crap. Usually they use well educated young people and dress them in designer western clothes and train them to use mental triggers so they never look nervous or out of place. The only thing SPOT will find is some poor bastard who hates flying or is worried when he gets were ever he is going will he be on time.
These people or something like them have been at London Heathrow airport for years.
I often see 3 or so of them lined up behind the immigration desk staff expressionlessly staring into the waiting crowd. I always wondered who or what they were looking for.
So now not only do I have to worry about standing on line, screeners going apeshit over electronic gadgets, missing my flight, dealing with rude agents with badges but now I have to worry about having the wrong expression on my face to avoid anal probes and or missed flights. You can tell I'm really looking forward to my next flight with reduced leg room and absurd baggage fees.
I'm sick and tired of all the cowards who live in a paranoid fantasy world and think that its ok to export their impractical nonsensical protectionism on the rest of us. Yes someone could blow up the plane your on or your car could explode or you could be hit in the head with a meteor.. Thats fricking life..get over it!
, I really don't see how it's going to violate our freedoms.
Lots of blind fools around ... The point you are missing is that it is simply scaremongering, their presence is forcing you to think about your appearance, whether your actions are suspicious in any way and they are also putting you in a state of permanent fear of terrorism. If you can't see how this is violating your freedom, you are already a sheep.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Let's face it. Governments are spending tons of money on high tech toys which are entirely ineffective at best and a total waste of time at the least.
High end tech to detect liquids still can't tell the difference between combustables, biological weapons and tooth paste. Batteries which are encased in materials which can easily conceal pretty much everything from a X-ray (all varieties) are permitted through at all times without real limits. Chemicals which can be mixed together to produce a bomb are inane by themselves and can easily pass through security unchecked and assembled afterwards.
Fact is, that there are infinite methods of passing explosives through security unchecked. More extravegant methods of destroying an airplane can be accomplished by purchasing everything needed after passing through check points. Knives can be formed from glass and prison style "shivs" can be made by melting the filters of cigarette butts and pressing them flat.
The only thing these overly expensive and majorly inconveniencing methods of terrorism deterance accomplishes is filling the wallets of security hardware vendors. A single "possible risk" concern raised by someone transporting incendiaries (some kid tried to sneak some sparklers through in his bags) will "tighten security" straight across the world on all US and British flights.
Profiling is possibly the only effective method of detecting genuine terrorist events in action. Does this mean it actually works? Hell, who knows. The biggest problem is that the security companies providing these "trained professionals" typically use employees that barely qualify for work more advanced than day labor. Let's face it. There aren't any really smart kids saying to mom and dad "When I grow up, I want to work in airport security". In fact, it's the type of career you find yourself in when there's no positions open at McDonalds.
If however you happen to land on someone who actually appears to be competant in this career and not overly paranoid, this person could be trained to watch a series of video cameras and identify people who are behaving suspiciously. Then the person can be visually followed and additional assistance can be used to help identify whether the person in question is a likely threat or just scared of flying or his mom catching him with a Playboy in his backpack (I'd imagine the behaviour would all look similar). Then the person can be spot checked before getting on the plane.
I'd imagine that Interpol, the FBI and MI-? all have legitimate profilers on staff that could be consulted on more difficult cases. Additionally, if there's someone in question that you just "get a feel is trouble" then there should be some undercover, armed military security that can be boarded onto the flight just in case.
It's about time that someone starts using their brains to solves these problems. I'm sure that I'm thoroughly underqualified for this, but I'd imagine that there's someone with 30 years military intelligence background that could come up with something.
Don't worry, from what I've heard, this has been going on for decades. A friend of my dad's who was italian, but dark skinned and with a big bushy beard used to get screened back in the *80s* for looking suspiciously like a 'terrorist' or whatever the going term was back in those days. Anyways he said he just came to expect it after a while, and planned an extra hour into his schedule for it.
I fly to and from Britain about 10 times a year and I actually lived in Scotland for 5 years. I get stopped quite often by those guys, probably on the ground that I'm quite fair skinned but have a bushy black beard and hair and look quite intellectualish-nerdish. Then I hand over my Italian passport and they start asking if I've been to Syria, Lebanon or Palestine or the Middle East. I answer with my best possible Glasgwegian accent that no, i've never been there and that I'm a software developer living on the continent catching up with my dearest mates and girlfriend back in Maryhill and that mainland europe is terrible and i'm moving back the soonest, honest. Then they laugh and let me go. On the other side, when I go through border control wearing a palestinian kefiah they never stop me. They're a leftover of the civil war in Ulster, apparently trained in remembering all the mugshots of IRA-affiliated people. Now they're a bit useless I guess.
Of course, that would give them away. No one goes through a US airport with genuine smiles and cheer anymore.
Flash Designers UK
Why not take some cues from Israeli airport security, when was the last time they had an airplane bombing? Instead of trying to spot terrorists using facial profiling, why not talk to passengers to see if there story seems consistent or whether they seem nervous. Of course the Israeli system is based heavily on discrimination, so it will never fly in North America.
Recently I transited through a US airport with my (Japanese) wife and two very young children (girl 3, boy 1.5), and it had been a very long flight to that point. But it was absolutely nothing next to how we felt after US airport security got through with us.
For what it's worth, I'm a tall, blond, very definitely Anglo male, my wife is Japanese (with a Japanese passport), we had grumpy two little kids with us, and we were merely transiting. Yet I may as well have been a bearded Hamas member waving an AK-47 around and screaming in Arabic as far as the US airport security people were concerned.
Never. Again.
Ever.
Any thoughts of visiting the USA are history.
Never will I set foot in your country ever again, nor spend so much as a dime in America, or (where possible) on American made goods.
Now you may dismiss us as only one family, but I know of others who feel the same way, and if we do there must be many, many more equally disgusted about the way the USA treats people in this regard.
I always get picked on by security at airports.Of course Caucasian with long hair and a beard must be a terrorist!
I remember they made me sit in a electronic shoe sniffing machine after that guy tried to blow up a plane with bombs in his shoes. I wonder how many more terrorists were caught using that expensive piece of equipment.
its the officer taking me to get me checked, frisked and anal probed because he thinks I am looking "suspicious". Maybe me looking like a "muslim" did help in making me looking "suspicious".
However, I agree, that there were and still are lots and lots of issues with civil liberty in the US and UK (and a couple outside of the US, enforced by the US) that are much, much worse.
I understand they can also SPOT how many miles per hour someone is driving!
Well, there was an MIT study that showed that random search was more secure than profiling.
http://www.acfnewsource.org/science/random_security.html
Also helpful is allowing frequent travelers who go through extra checks to have a special ID to go through speedily. This used to be a commercial service. Like HOV lanes, it speeds up traffic for everyone. And it makes sense that the travelers who travel the most would pay to have extra background checks to travel faster.
http://www.flyclear.com/
The TSA blacklist seems to be a very bad idea, it has lots of errors, and it's way too easy to use it as a harassment tool against people or political groups that any sort of government agency or official doesn't like.
http://vigilant.tv/article/3071/epic-publishes-tsa-blacklist-memos
Godammit! We just voted the last lot of crazy loons out because they kept doing this sort of thing. The new ConLib govt are getting rid of a lot of Labour's crap so you'd hope this sort of thing would stop too.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Don't tell me I'm the only one who thought of Blade Runner while looking at the machines used to detect physiological cues in TFA.
I thought it was real.
Like "24".
Or Knight Rider.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
Actually, it sounds like exactly the sort of expensive worthless voodoo techno-babble scam run by Scientologists.
Hmm, it makes sense. Why go to all the bother of fleecing individuals one at a time, when the government's has already got a system in place to do it wholesale? It's far more efficient to go after a cut of the big cake.
Coming to an airport near you: the E-Meter Thetan-Terrorist Detectorator?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Now I can look forward to being pulled out of line because of a facial expression which looked like nervousness which was only there because I was nervous of being pulled out of line, having my bags opened and searched (not that I would carry anything embarrassing or improper) and my life examined for a couple of hours (possibly missing my flight) all because some dudes with fake passports and box cutters got an idiot pilot of a plane, full of idiot passengers who sat on their collective hands while being told they were going to die, to fly it into a building.
Seriously... This is idiotic, solves nothing, and only inconveniences holiday makers and businessmen. No way am I flying to America until this daft security theatre is scrapped and sanity once more is restored.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
his claims.
This is like asking one psychic about the veracity of another psychic.
Lie Detectors are a known-to-be-bullshit product which the Feds seem to love spending money on.
This seems to be more-of-the-same.
the usa has committed plenty of crimes in this world and is worthy of much scorn and hostility by many people
but what i don't understand is selective outrage: outrage at the usa for maltreatments and crimes that almost every other country in the world is guilty of. such as what you just wrote above
people like being trendy i guess
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I've boarded an El-Al flight from Tel-Aviv with live ammunition in my pockets.
The ammo was found in the U.S. airport, when I was on my way for an internal flight. This time two soldiers with M-16s made sure my ass remained in the chair while two other guys checked my luggage thoroughly in search of the gun.
As an Israeli, I avoid Israeli security people like the plague: they decrease security even better than they decrease unemployment.
The only purpose of TSA is to demonstrate to formerly free citizens that they are subject to the whims of barely literate bureaucrats.
I was flying from London yesterday and I was being questioned stupid questions like what have you been doing there, what museums have you visited...etc. And it was just because I got unlucky that my my eyes ended for a half second on the policman. But what do they think they will find out with such questions? Do they not know that professional terorists would be 100% more certain with their answers then I was in this unexpected questioning. Also a terrorist would never lay so suspisiously an eye on the policemen as I did. Its pseudoscience. Perhaps its just because they want to pretend they have things under control. Or they just lower the unemployment or some other ridiculous reasons. Such practices are really uncomfortable.
And divining rods to locate terrorists.
Therefore we do this. ...without considering if 'this' is useful or effective. It's pointless doing things that don't work or ineffective.
Actually, there's a specific circumstance where there is a point to doing things that don't work - when you don't know that they're not going to work; call it a specific method of study.
Still, in order for something like SPOT to work, I think we'd first need high definition video of how actual terrorists behaved in an actual airport before an attack. I'm not sure we have those. To train against false positives, we'd also need video of non-terrorists, but those would be relatively easy to get.
I could see myself signing off on a '5 year trial' of SPOT, but by the same token, I'd have no problems shutting it down if, at the end of five years, it had proven ineffective. Thing is, it can be tough to be effective. We average, what, 1-2 terrorist attacks on planes per year, and worldwide at that? Even then, I wouldn't necessarily consider the signs of an ineffective terrorist the same as an effective one. I'm sure the shoe and crotch bombers acted differently than the ones that committed 9/11. You go by that you're reduced to something like 1 major attack per decade, if that.
Meanwhile you have to screen around 2.1 Million passangers, in the USA, per day. 767.5 Million a year, 2009 figure.
You're looking at lottery level odds of any one passanger being a major terrorist intending to perform an act during that flight.
The SPOT guys could have a 99.9999% accuracy rate at eliminating false positives and a 100% rate of catching terrorists, and they'd still trigger on 768 innocent people per terrorist caught.
I don't read AC A human right
People should be able to bring guns and knives on a plane.
A criminal or terrorist is far less likely to try to pull something if he knows everyone on the plane is armed and ready to respond.
The fundamental problem with our approach to security is that it is build on enforcing weakness and vulnerability in the passengers. This makes them attractive targets.
Build security on strength. Arm them all. And maybe put some armed police officers on the plane too, for good measure.
Show the terrorists that we aren't spineless sissies.
Hasn't Israel been doing exactly this sort of screening for decades with a very high success rate? (No hijackings since the 60's)
Someone drives into an airport in a burning car - probable terrorist.
Someone walks into airport - probable non-terrorist.
Easy.
There have been, what, 6 terrorist plane incidents in the last 10 years, 2 of which had no fatalities, in the US? And 6 crashes with fatalities due to other reasons in the same period. Looks like we'd be better of putting time, effort, and money should be put into plane maintenance; mechanic, air controller, and pilot training, salaries, and working conditions; instead of security theater. See also: PBS Frontline's Flying Cheap.
I'd rather they stare at me than put me through all the security crap that costs billions of dollars in equipment and TSA personnel. Somehow, the Israelis have figured out how to use behavioral recognition w/o all the extraneous BS according to everything I've read on the subject thus far.
1. I would never work for the federal government 2. I wouldn't want to work at the TSA for the same reason I don't want to be mall security 3. Shitty pay 4. The joke that is the TSA is only one piece of the overall Homeland Security clusterfuck.
'Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.' - Mao Tse-tung
Did anyone else get the image of Mac from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia saying "I did an ocular pat down and I cleared him?"