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.
From the title, I was expecting it to be psychically trained TSA agents.
Dogs are very important to airport security.
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.
The only thing SPOT will find is zen meditation masters who can endure any hardship without emotion and medicated people. Everyone else that goes though the current airport fake security fascism, terrorist or not, will have the same pissed off look.