TSA Says Theyre Not Discriminating Against Black Women but Body Scanners May Be
propublica.org
propublica.org
They literally say so in the subtitle. The discrimination exists before people enter the airport, and it comes in the form of what hairstyle to choose. This is partly done on a cultural basis, and partly because of a different hair composition. But the important thing is, the machine does not differentiate on the basis of race, it's a machine that detects areas of suspect density that could presumably be hiding contraband. I am a white man with long dense hair, and my hair triggers the machine almost every time. Not because I look like a hippy, and Nixon is still running the show, but because I could hide things in my hair.
The fact that certain hairstyles are more popular within a racial group IS the discriminating factor, not the machine.
As u/tj-teej pointed out [0], the utilizers of this tech have the agency and means to improve or mitigate the tech, including prioritizing the training of algorithms to handle black hair styles instead of shunting it off to an edge case, conveniently burdening a demographic who has been historically limited in power and influence.
To think of it another way: in many parts of the U.S., Asians are very much a minority. Asians more commonly have narrower eyes which can interfere with face detection/recognition [1]. In the near and possible future, when face-detection becomes a "feature" in security tech as a means to expedite processing -- e.g. if your face is scanned and not found in a "Real ID" database, you're automatically put in a line for more invasive searching -- would Asian-Americans not have a legitimate case that the U.S. gov't has failed to improve their tech to the detriment of Asian-American citizens? Especially when it seems Asian countries have successfully mitigated the issue?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19684290
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-newzealand-passport-error...
If you don't like it ... then you are free to change your hairstyle ...
Come to think of it, there's no justification for allowing passengers to keep their clothes on as they pass through security.
I don't agree with your last point though. The discriminating factor is that the machine screening is designed based on the average white male and female appearance. And that means that anyone outside that built in assumption, whether its a white dude with a thick ponytail, or a black woman with a Afro gets extra screening.
What the article is trying to highlight is that when we design such systems we shouldn't just be designing them against the average because that causes the system to discriminate against anyone outside that average.
1. https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...
Discrimination's common definition has the negative connotation, but in this case, it seems to legitimately be "discriminating" based on ability to hide contraband, however in this case "discriminating" is synonymous with "differentiate".
To top it all off, we are all paying millions of dollars for this, via taxes for some fancy security theater to tell us, whether there is the "ability to hide contraband", which seems utterly insane.
It's definitely trying to split some really fine hairs to be saying 'actually, it isn't discriminating against black people, it's discriminating against hair types that are highly correlated with being a black person, and it's totally acceptable that people with those hair types should be considered suspect / subject to further scrutiny', as if that is some sort of edge case that couldn't have possibly be thought about beforehand.
I absolutely don't think we should be defending a tech / procedure that only seems to be negatively affecting people, costs millions, and doesn't seem to have any positives effects,
Most of the people who ordered, designed, built and tested the machine are white.
They don't have to explicitly discriminate against blacks.
They can just go their business as usual, designing stuff based on their own norms and cultural habits, and it will come out as naturally discriminating.
If all those whites doing the machine's design had those "certain hairstyles" in the same ratio as blacks, and were flagged as much when they've tested it, they'd have considered this facet of the machine as useless and removed it...
Kind of like the Amazon facial recognition, [0] that really didn't work well on minorities, likely due to the training models used
[0] https://medium.com/@bu64dcjrytwitb8/on-recent-research-audit...
I’m guessing it was predominantly white men who built this machine and white men who tested it. Reminds me of certain facial-recognition programs being (initially) unable to identify black faces. It may not be racism, but it is discrimination.
Following the simplest case, because lighter skin gives greater contrast is _not_ racism.
It's not 'unnecessary discrimination' either, as it arises out of the facts of how light works.
It's like saying that products with a weight limit that arises out of the materials used are "fattist".
And literacy tests for voters simply ensures that our electorate is properly educated. Any side effects are a convenient freebie.
The context to keep in mind is that the TSA has repeatedly demonstrated incompetence at their stated goal.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/the-tsa...
Now let's also assume African-Americans are disproportionately incarcerated, and therefore names associated with the ethnic group will be disproportionately represented in criminal records. I'm sure we can agree on that the system would then be biased towards a race.
The problem is that there isn't a single terrorist that caused this, in fact there's no good reason to believe that the hairstyles mentioned in the article are used to hide contraband.
That is not a politically-acceptable argument.
The TSA wants to externalize its discrimination to "the machine", but the machine is a product of human systems, and reflects and captures the biases that already exist in society.
If these kinds of technologies treat the hair of a certain race as a P1, then the technology (and people who designed the tech and the program) are participating in discrimination.
I'm not saying this to be 'woke' or to 'cancel' TSA. It's just a fact; and once we can all admit it (a lot of people in this thread don't seem to be able to), then we can make changes to fix it.
Editorial: If an aspect of traveling makes you feel like an 'other' in your own country, that's wrong, and I don't think public funds should be encouraging that. Public buildings have to have wheel-chair ramps, and TSA body scanners shouldn't be racialized.
If the parameter is incorrect, then the parameter should be adjusted correctly. Note that having an availability bias in the dataset is also incorrect, the parameter will reflect the incorrectness.
However, if the parameter is adjusted correctly: what is the problem other than people not wanting to be confronted with uncomfortable truths?
People of African descent have a propensity towards the problem hairstyle that skews the results.
If your argument is for 'de-racialization' then you need to convince people to change their hairstyles to make everyone more similar.
You can't blame a machine for treating a 1 as 1 and 0 as 0.
If everyone in the country had the "certain hairstyles we'd have no problem saying "this machine doesn't work".
And frankly I don't think anyone who knows a lot of African-American Women would even consider asking them to change their hair.
Some hairstyles are just bunched up and the machine can't tell what it is, so it gets flagged for manual inspection.
This is not a problem that is easily solved with technology.
Your only options are:
(1) not checking anyone's hair
(2) manually checking everyone's hair
(3) letting the machine do it's job and accept the fact that it can't scan certain hairstyles.
On the contrary, it would be easier to say that the machine does work because it does flag down people who have suspicious body features regardless of race.
They launched this new tech knowing a "certain type of hair" (specifically black women's) triggers the machine (and triggers degrading searches). I'm saying this machine shouldn't be launched if that's the consequences, I'm saying that it's discriminatory.
This is a pretty bold conclusion to make. Why do you assert this isn't so? There's no way to be certain of this because we can't read people's minds. A potential terrorist may have been thwarted simply because a TSA Agent refused to allow a weapon into the secured area.
They've caught idiots with handguns and drugs in their luggage, which is fine, but there was no intention of doing anyone harm.
So no. They're as useless as a security blanket.
The TSA need not publicize their wins to prove effectiveness. Guilt can only be established in court; deterrence (which is what we’re talking about here) requires a much lower standard.
Consider the TSA's bad press. There are years of stories detailing pervasive fail rates in detecting smuggled weapons or explosives by inspectors, misconduct and other scandals, and a number of viral videos showing incidents with groping and other bad behavior. If the TSA had major successes under their belt, it'd offer some rather useful political capital to deploy during the game of hardball that is the federal budget process. And the screeners' union, the AFGE, would be positively thrilled to be able to leverage those successes in support of extending full Title 5 protections and collective bargaining rights, not to mention General Schedule pay, to TSA screeners. Pushing back against the idea that screeners are incompetent would be of immense benefit to both the agency and the union.
Beyond that, a failed plot on US soil would lead to criminal charges against the conspirators. There should be evidence of major TSA successes in court records, and yet, nothing.
Don't they? The diehard libertarians I've been exposed to are the first and loudest to complain about the TSA. Is there some constituency I'm unaware of that's anti-government action but not anti-TSA?
They bark and complain and then get on their knees and lick the boot.
The article says false alarm, but when you think about the goal here, a false alarm might just be a lack of ability to get an accurate read through black hair styles. A false alarm doesn’t mean they’re accusing someone. It means their tech isn’t good enough to do the job and they need a manual check to cover the gap.
Let’s say it is somehow technologically impossible to infer what’s hidden in an Afro. Wouldn’t you expect manual checks to occur? Otherwise what’s the point of doing checks at all? There would be an easy strategy: rock a ‘fro
Unless your argument is against the TSA being nothing but theater because the task is basically impossible against a good determined actor but that’s a separate issue.
Now, with certain hairstyles, I would guess the algorithms can't reliably distinguish hairstyle from concealed items and just alert. I would guess that a human looking at the the imaging would be able to distinguish, but that would involve the TSA being able to see you naked again.
Sometimes I get a friendly agent and they send me on with minimal fuss, and sometimes they’re jerks and try to find a way to stop me from going thru security.
Yet another reason to opt out of the body scanners. No one wants a pat down due to a machine deciding that their genitals are an "anomaly"