Comment by dkokelley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dkokelley | Hacker News Reader

I'm a little disappointed with the response here. This isn't "racial profiling".

FAST is designed to track and monitor, among other inputs, body movements, voice pitch changes, prosody changes (alterations in the rhythm and intonation of speech), eye movements, body heat changes, and breathing patterns. Occupation and age are also considered. A government source told CNET that blink rate and pupil variation are measured too.

This technology should only be used to say "look here" to assist the people behind the technology. Ideally, this will help a few screeners identify people in a crowd who are behaving abnormally. This 'tech' has been used in security for ages. Only earlier we called it "I have a funny feeling about that guy" and now we can say "this man is suspiciously nervous, and here's the science to show it".

I don't want to get political, but the politically correct method of pure random screening in airports is horribly ineffective. Security professionals in unstable regions know this, which is why they are trained to look for the exact things this device is looking for.

The danger of this technology isn't that it will start issuing arrest warrants based on probable intent. The danger is that the people behind the technology will get it wrong. History shows that we don't need technology to help get it wrong.

Please don't confuse this technology with political positions. Has the TSA gotten out of hand? Sure. Are our rights being violated? Probably in many cases. Does this technology have anything to do with that? That only depends on how it's used.

We can't unequivocally say it's not racial profiling. All we know from the article is that ethnicity is being used as a factor. If a person's race/ethnicity can in any way make it more likely for the system to flag that person, then racial profiling is arguably happening.

So the question is: Under this system, can a person's race increase the likelihood of a positive result? It seems the answer is yes. If race is a factor, that means it's somehow being used as in input into the algorithm that determines a person's suspicion score. Maybe it's not something as heavy handed as "boost the suspicion score if the person is of race X." Suppose it's "weigh eye movement more heavily than breathing if the person is of race X." Even then, the effect is to increase the likelihood of a positive result _for some people_ based on their race.

I missed the explicit part about ethnicity. Rereading that makes me think that those factors are used as a baseline along with age, height, and weight to determine the normal 'indicative' factors like pupil dilation and heart rate, and then flag people who are abnormal given their ethnic, age, height, and weight group norms.

It seems that either the phrase in question was poorly worded, or the DHS is in for a serious media storm.

> This isn't "racial profiling".

The CNET article says it's a system that [DHS] hopes will use factors such as ethnicity, gender, breathing, and heart rate. In the CBS News article linked from there, essentially the same claim is made.

There's no actual evidence in either article that ethnicity will be used.

One of the documents on the EPIC site (fastinstallation.pdf) says "The system is gender-, culture- and age-neutral".

I've skimmed through all the documents linked from there and can't find anything that admits to using ethnicity or gender. (There is one paragraph that says that a FAST trial will collect ethnicity and gender information "to understand whether the technology performs differently with different demographic groups", which is a different thing entirely.)

If the system is ever deployed, I wouldn't be desperately surprised if it turns out to use ethnicity as evidence of malintent. But it does look as if Declan McCullagh may be making a dramatic claim for which he lacks evidence.

The real problem is that it presupposes thought-crime. The DHS document in the sidebar says FAST will "identify individuals with malintent ... *Malintent: the state of mind of individuals intending to cause harm ..."

Whether it's really scientific, I doubt we'll ever find out. But people will be more likely to believe it's scientific because it comes out of a box that uses 'algorithms'.

Another problem is one that Schneier writes about: profiling leaves vulnerabilities that can be probed, discovered, and exploited. In the case of trying to sense malicious intent, it could be sending someone who doesn't know they're an attacker. Or someone who doesn't exhibit the outward signs that are being profiled.

Or just give the attacker Xanax and they'll be cool as as cucumber.

I agree that a system like this could be probed and exploited. The real issue comes up after someone is flagged as suspicious. Is this person arrested right away? Is this person subject to additional screening? It would violate basic human decency to arrest someone for appearing suspicious, regardless of whether or not he or she was 'scientifically suspicious'. Taking a closer look at suspiciously behaving individuals doesn't seem to cross that line for me. We've been doing that for years. The only difference now is that we have a machine to help scale that effort.

This is definitely the key point of the issue. As long as people aren't arrested for 'intent' to commit a crime - which is really impossible to prove without action - this tech might help out a lot. If it works as advertised and is used responsibly, it might help bring certain areas closer to security, instead of security theater. The privacy implications need to be managed carefully; it's probably too much to ask for them to not be botched.

The other problem is that there is a whole grey area between "let the guy go, he isn't doing anything" and "tackle and arrest him now". The person can be detain, held up, put in a different queue, screened, probed, strip searched, etc.

Given TSA's record so far, it will result in various situations which violate people's rights without ever arresting them.

I may be wrong, but it seems to me that this tech, just like the metal detector and the porno scanner, are just ways of giving less-than-expert staff the ability to perform expert-like security screenings. In other words, someone with a two week training course in how to fire up this magic box is now charged with making the determination of whether each person passing through their station needs to get a secondary screening (of various invasiveness). What is this employee to do when the machine tells him, "we've got to strip-search this person now" and the person is a 95 year old woman in a wheel chair? How about if it's a 5 year old?

Maybe we need to give the TSA security more training/hire more professional security staff that would use years of experience rather than magic tools to determine who could be dangerous. Or do what the is done in Mexican airports: you push a button and if it comes out red you get your bags searched; if green, you can proceed. Random number generator FTW!

it isn't about exploiting the system by some individual(s). It is about society making a new step enabled by the technology:

>The real problem is that it presupposes thought-crime.

exactly. The modern theory of organized violence allows for the society to apply violence through its government as executive organ to exterminate (usually by making a law and enforcing it or by just acting directly like using Reaper/Hellfire) whatever the society deems a danger to itself. The only recognized limits on this violence is in the Constitution and there is nothing in, for example, the US Constitution about freedom of thought. Thus as soon as thoughts can be distinguished/categorized, some of them can be outlawed and the law enforced.

Btw, would it be a fair use to mentally replay the scenes from a movie? Only if it is limited to 30 sec? Or only if memorized/replayed resolution is below some threshold? ... We're in for an interesting ride.

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