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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?
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.
Anyone who is that good at reading people,
has a better job than TSA screener.
expandfairuse.org
From the title, I was expecting it to be psychically trained TSA agents.
So, this is basically the same thing that the premise of the show "Lie to Me" is based on. Intriguing.
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
The fact that there were no attempts or successes during that period is evidence that it's not needed. Terrorism is a very small threat compared with things like cancer, dieing in a non-terrorist plane crash and any number of real problems. Terrorism happens to be very flashy, but the reality is that even with the policies in place prior to 9/11 it was a very unlikely event that terrorists would have any meaningful luck.
Whereas you've got the government scaring the crap out of people without terrorist help. Of course terrorists aren't bothering to do it, the US government is doing a superb job of keeping people terrified.
If the number of criminals caught is barely over half of the number looking for them, we're paying 60-120k/year/criminal when we could just roll a d100 vs warrants check and do a better job for less.
But catching 1710 criminals is meaningful, for the slight inconvenience the others faced. What's wrong with catching criminals?
0.5% of the people selected for secondary screening by the SPOT officers ended up getting arrested, and thus 99.5% of them did not. Is there any data that suggests that such an arrest rate is substantially higher than could be expected from any random sampling of air travelers? If not, then the SPOT officers don't appear to be doing anything worthwhile.
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.
Agreed. Given the mere 0.5% arrest rate, I'm pretty skeptical that such figures would show that the SPOT officers earn their pay.
Who says he didn't?
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.
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%.
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
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.
Damn. I'd TOTALLY sign up for that job. Rolling a d100 vs warrants? SWEET!!!!
Only one question....could I use 2d10 instead sometimes, if there are a lot of people? I know they don't work out the same, but they are close, and d100 takes a DAMN long time to come to a halt....
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
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.
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.
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.
Someone drives into an airport in a burning car - probable terrorist.
Someone walks into airport - probable non-terrorist.
Easy.