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.
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
Yet, somehow, there haven't been any more planes bringing down skyscrapers or smashing into the Pentagon. Maybe the showmanship is having the desired effect?
When I think about those that would say that we're "just lucky" the underwear bomber or Times Square bomber were unsuccessful, I think about how my Dad used to tell me that "luck" is what happens to those who are prepared. If only incompetents are getting through, it might mean that the competent ones are being interdicted. Either way, when I fly I'm a lot more concerned about how narrow the seats are than the fact that some Fed with sunglasses looked me over as I boarded the plane. In fact, I'm OK if every other passenger on the plane was an armed Fed wearing sunglasses. At least that means there won't be any crying babies.
You are welcome on my lawn.
What the fuck is wrong with putting something over your face? For fuck's sake, you saying I can't wear sunglasses? You can go fuck yourself. How about you wear whatever the hell you want and I wear whatever the hell I want and we're both happy. It's my fucking right to wear what I want, asshole.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.