Hitachi Develops Boarding Gate With Built-In Explosives Detector

An anonymous reader writes "Hitachi, in collaboration with Nippon Signal and the University of Yamanashi, have successfully prototyped a boarding gate with built-in explosives detection equipment as part of efforts to increase safety in public facilities such as airports. The prototype boarding gate efficiently collects minute particles which have affixed themselves to IC cards or portable devices used as boarding passes, and can detect within 1-2 seconds the presence of explosive compounds using internalized equipment. With this method, it is possible to inspect 1,200 passengers per hour."

Comments

Soooooo...

[jamstar7]

I skimmed the link, looked like typical marketting pitch stuff. I didn't see any error rates on this marvelous new device. I'm curious as to how many false positives it's going to generate, and how often it will miss carry-on explosives. I'm also wondering how many days I'll need to stay away from the rifle range before I won't show any particulate explosives at one of these checkpoints.

Re:Soooooo...

[AlecC]

Relevant comment. Contrary to what most people think, the false positive rate is far more important than the false negative rate. If it has a false negative (i.e. missing real bombs) rate, it will still succeed in its main task, of deterring would be bombers, because they will not take a 95% chance of detection. (Assuming, of course, the false negatives are random). On the other hand, if it has a false positive rate of 0.1%, that is a false alarm for about one in four aircraft boardings, which it totally unacceptable, And, as you say, a recent visit to a rifle range would be highly likely to trigger a false positive. They need to tune the false positives down to less than 0.001% while still keeping false negatives to just a few percent. Which may not be easy.

The TSA will not accept it

[Required Snark]

It doesn't conform to the TSA paradigm, so they will reject it.

1. It is not intrusive enough.

2. It replaces sullen TSA uniformed personal with hardware.

3. It reduces the DHS conditioning intended to make the general public accept arbitrary behavior by the government.

4. It is not as dangerous as full body radiation from scanners.

There are a few things that might make the TSA like it.

1. It is really expensive.

2. It doesn't actually work.

3. It will interfere with people for no discernible reason.

On the whole, it's reducing the number and visible presence of the TSA uniformed types that will keep it from being adopted. They are already so expensive, intrusive, arbitrary, and incompetent that they don't need that level of automation.