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Comment by jpalomaki | Hacker News Reader

In a away this actually makes sense. Instead of relying on automatic systems and algorithms, you rely on people, namely the agent performing the interview. A short chat about selected topics might be actually quite revealing. Point not being if you know the exact right answer for the BST question but more how you react and if there are inconsistencies in your story (most people are pretty bad at lying).

All of this could be backed by the personal data has been collected before hand.

The old (and often linked?) article about airport security in Israel[1] describes how the actually rely a lot on people being able to spot strange behavior.

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-wagner/what-israeli-air...

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What would happen when I answer with "I don't know what a Binary Search Tree is or how to balance it - I'm just a shitty CSS developer"?

"Welcome home"

"How do you create a variable-equal-height three column layout using css? ... without tables. in IE6. Write your css on this whiteboard with this marker that's nearly run out."

    .bs-equalheight .bs-responsive .col-md-3

Checkmate, TSA. /s

Now, do it without Bootstrap.

I think he just landed himself a solid 10-15 behind bars.

Id rather land behind bars than code in IE6 again....

Did you miss the "shitty" part?

This is exactly correct. When I returned from a weekend vacation in New York a few years ago, Canadian customs asked me about the tourist sites I visited. It's not that they thought attending a musical and visiting the 9/11 memorial was suspicious; it was just a convenient topic of conversation while they watched to see if I seemed nervous or otherwise suspicious.

I don't know about 'Correct'. When you enter Australia you never even talk to anyone anymore - immigration is all done via self-serve kiosks.

For the select few with the right citizenship. Everybody else queues up to talk to immigration. During busy time it can take 2h. The self serve kiosks are not the norm.

This has become a lot better in the US now too - I can use my Australian passport at their self-serve kiosks when travelling on an ESTA that has a renewal.

You still have to talk to the immigration officer though - everyone does.

Travelling to Australia as a New Zealand citizen is about as easy as it gets. My last flight from Sydney to Auckland I was at home 45 minutes after the plane landed.

Canada has self-serve kiosks for the paperwork, but they print a ticket which you hand in to an agent, and (depending on how long the line is) they usually ask a few questions before they wave you on.

In Australia (for certain nations only apparently) you never talk to a person.

I went to Australia and there are still passport officers. The last one told me she liked the joke on my tshirt. But again, in Australia when there's a terrorist attack, they create an #illridewithyou trend on Twitter... Not everything is pink, but they at least have a good go at trying.

Though they still do the odd manual stop and search in my experience. When my son and I were returning from Singapore a couple of years ago, my son had bought a guitar over there and had it in a gig bag strapped to his back in the immigration line as we came back into Australia.

Immigration let everyone through without question, but as soon as they saw him with the guitar they asked him to step forward to an inspection point. I went along to observe, and it was quite interesting. The guy and the lady at the inspection desk asked him to put the guitar case flat on the desk and open it to remove the guitar.

While he did this, I noted that they never took their eyes off his face. They never even glanced at the guitar or the case. He was halfway through taking it out when they told him it was all OK and to stow it away again and be on our way.

I had always heard that the officers watched for your reaction which 9 times out of 10 gives the person away if they are trying to hide something, but this was the first time I had witnessed it first hand.

They still swoop in and perform random tests and interviews on people, even happens when you're a Australian citizen LEAVING the country. Last time I flew to LA, I had a customs guy give me a really limp-wristed frisking.

I always get nervous when passing US border checks.

Once I got asked how many times have you been here, I replied that this is my second time (thinking he means San Francisco), but he said: "It says here that you were in the US 3 times". That really got me nervous, I wouldn't like to get turned away and look for a flight back home.

Do they think that a poor guy at the border can recognize a skilled terrorist? What they do is scare the hell out of ordinary people.

They know that people get nervous. But there's a difference between the nervousness of someone who is intimidated by authority figures and the nervousness of someone who is trying to enter the country illegally or smuggle something in.

Odds of their screening catching a skilled terrorist? Pretty low -- although terrorists generally fall into the category of "bungling" more than "skilled". Odds of them catching people who are smuggling drugs, or entering as "tourists" but actually planning on working? Much higher -- because it's easy to learn to recognize the common cases.

> But there's a difference between the nervousness of someone who is intimidated by authority figures and the nervousness of someone who is trying to enter the country illegally or smuggle something in.

Is there? What's the difference if the emotion is 'nervousness' and the outward expression of that emotion signals 'nervousness'? Who is skilled enough to distinguish between the two degrees of nervousness?

> Who is skilled enough

Someone who spends 40 hours a week practicing.

How much feedback do they get from this practice though?

If you were a 'bad' border protection agent, and you let everyone through, how do you learn? And equally if you select people for secondary interrogation that are allowed to enter, how does that feed back to you?

I guess I'm curious to know a bit more about how the organisation is structured, as there's equivalent in tech discussions, "Ten years experience vs. one years experience ten times." Without some structure to know when you're doing it wrong or right, you can be talking to people for 40 hours a week and not get much out of it.

One way would be to use "known suspicious persons" as training material. Build the system used by the agent so that it does not immediately notify when the passport for such person is scanned, but instead let the border guard do the chatting and only indicate a bit later in the process this person should not be let through.

A bit similar method is (or was) used to keep the X-ray machine operators at airport awake. Software superimposes images of prohibited items on the X-ray image [1] and operator is supposed to notice them.

The other case (false positives) would be harder to tackle on the case or border agent. Maybe it would help if the same agent was actually involved in the detailed investigation and not just responsible of flagging suspicious people.

[1] http://www.nature.com/news/2004/040116/full/news040112-15.ht...

Agreed. False confessions are an excellent example of this.

Odds of them 'catching' someone who is just shy and nervous? Even higher - there's no negative feedback when you turn away someone who was just a tourist, after all.

It's not about recognising a terrorist, it's about recognising a liar and uncovering information.

>it was just a convenient topic of conversation while they watched to see if I seemed nervous or otherwise suspicious.

Is this acceptable? Is there any correlation between "criminal" or "terrorist" and "acts nervous at border"? Are common border guards trained well enough to distinguish these subtle cues if they exist?

No.

It's very easy to spot when someone is nervous, there's nothing subtle about it.

If you're twitchy, talking fast, sweating and can't answer questions accurately about your job or a place you've just visited, then yes I think that is absolutely suspicious and worth investigating.

I agree. I once was returning to the US via Newark airpot (in New Jersey) and the agent asked me what subway stop I lived by since I lived in NYC. I knew that I could have responded any answer, so he just want to see how I would react.

Once I was returning from a year long trip where I visited 16 countries. Too many for the immigration form, and half of them were visited on another passport (dual citizen). Immigration asked me what country I visited and hesitated a bit. Then I told him that I did not know how to answer since I have been traveling around the world!

Sorry but that is the worst idea ever. CS is a far too wide a subject and border agent is a pen pusher who does not possess competence to ask any questions on that subject.

I know several engineers who are very good and probably have never heard of BST because they are too busy writing CSS or designing circuitboards.

This is done, to mainly deter people planning to jump visas. People show fake experience to get a visa. We have a mini industry in India supporting such jumpers. Though the numbers have reduced.

I'd love to know if there are as many false positive detainments for no apparent reason in Israel as in the US (percentage-wise of course) - because all the people I know who ever travelled there found the security measures to be "maybe a bit much" but never "ridiculous, while also a total security theater" like in the US. Or didn't I just hear the stories?

+1: On more than one occasion I've had to fly without my driver's license, and the agent has always grilled me with the clear intent to see if I'm lying.

1. Why'd you lose your wallet? [Uhh...?]

2. When'd you lose it? [At a software conference this past weekend]

3. What languages do you know? [Ruby, JavaScript, Java, Some C]

4. So how many days ago did you lose your wallet again?

And what's wrong with that?

oddly enough, I'd probably get more attention from border agents than my actual colleagues.

I wonder how long they'd put up with my ramblings about memoization and search optimizations before they let me through. :P

Wouldn't a deceitful person just claim to have an occupation that they are actually knowledgeable about? This is basically just taking a test where you get to pick the subject.

"It says here you're a... bombmaker. Would you care to explain the chemical composition of C4?"

I think the point is whether it's a good allocation of resources.

Lets say you have two borders. One has a cursory check of documentation, so allows people to sail through. This costs 2X to man. Another has a more interactive exchange, but each interaction takes longer, so costs 5X to man.

So you either pay 5X, or 2X and then have 3X to do something else with. Could you use that 3X to better protect the border through pro-active investigation and analysis?

On the other hand, attempts to do this in the US have led to the "behavior detection officers". And you can Google that phrase for a roundup of how poorly it's performed.

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