Furthermore, considering false positives; they claim a 78% success rate in detecting "malintent".
Right off that's a little ridiculous, nothing can detect "intent" of any kind. What they're actually detecting isn't "malintent", as they show in their cartoon here
but different biological cues... heart rate, respiration, pupil dilation.
Which sounds to me like they're basically detecting stress.
So I guess the brilliant assumption they based their design on was that nobody in an airport is going to be stressed unless they're a terrorist.
They sort of pre-emptively account for weaknesses like this by saying, in the literature I've glanced through so far, that their system doesn't detect GUILT, but is just used as an indicator that somebody maybe should be looked at more closely. Sort of a catch-all weasel-out, indicating that they are aware that they are going to be generating a lot of false positives, but, YOU KNOW, we are just going to be having a LOOK at false positives, not arresting them. Don't WORRY too much about that.
But even with that weasel-out, I think the end result is ridiculous. I mean, of all the people who are going to register the stress-type indicators they are detecting, is it even more likely than a random guess that they are terrorists?
I mean, you look at the group of people showing stress in an airport, what percentage of them are terrorists? It's an absurdly small number. I think they would probably do just as well to harass every traveler wearing green socks, for the practical advantage it would give.
But worse, personally, I hate flying. I always find airports stressful. So they put this idiotic system in place, and I can just see it now, their stupid robot terrorist detector will probably flash an alarm on me every time.
Great.
I find it easy to imagine. The security guys, sympathizing with me, and saying they hate the stupid system as much as I do, but, you know, ya can't argue with a computer!
Welcome to the future, where we have invented sophisticated electronic systems to order us to do idiotic things.
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Furthermore, considering false positives; they claim a 78% success rate in detecting "malintent".
... heart rate, respiration, pupil dilation.
Right off that's a little ridiculous, nothing can detect "intent" of any kind. What they're actually detecting isn't "malintent", as they show in their cartoon here
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/tech/FAST.JPG
but different biological cues
Which sounds to me like they're basically detecting stress.
So I guess the brilliant assumption they based their design on was that nobody in an airport is going to be stressed unless they're a terrorist.
They sort of pre-emptively account for weaknesses like this by saying, in the literature I've glanced through so far, that their system doesn't detect GUILT, but is just used as an indicator that somebody maybe should be looked at more closely. Sort of a catch-all weasel-out, indicating that they are aware that they are going to be generating a lot of false positives, but, YOU KNOW, we are just going to be having a LOOK at false positives, not arresting them. Don't WORRY too much about that.
But even with that weasel-out, I think the end result is ridiculous. I mean, of all the people who are going to register the stress-type indicators they are detecting, is it even more likely than a random guess that they are terrorists?
I mean, you look at the group of people showing stress in an airport, what percentage of them are terrorists? It's an absurdly small number. I think they would probably do just as well to harass every traveler wearing green socks, for the practical advantage it would give.
But worse, personally, I hate flying. I always find airports stressful. So they put this idiotic system in place, and I can just see it now, their stupid robot terrorist detector will probably flash an alarm on me every time.
Great.
I find it easy to imagine. The security guys, sympathizing with me, and saying they hate the stupid system as much as I do, but, you know, ya can't argue with a computer!
Welcome to the future, where we have invented sophisticated electronic systems to order us to do idiotic things.