Hacker News Reader

Comment by noonespecial | Hacker News Reader

What would sane people do? A simple alarm(1) would have sent a patrol car out to investigate. A wet tired man would have been brought to the airport infirmary where a few questions would have been asked verifying his story while he was checked for hypothermia. The truly paranoid might have sent a coast guard boat out to get the jet-ski, further confirming his story (and hooray, getting him his wallet back). He's home for dinner with a story to tell.

Honestly now, how many Americans think that this isn't the way this should have happened? How in the hell did we get this far off course? It sounds from the story that the thing they're most upset about is missing an opportunity to lock down the whole airport while they dressed up as storm troopers and traipsed about in their armored doohickeys pretending to save the world. I think we're voting on all the wrong stuff this November.

(1) ...That works because we've had that technology since 1947.

View on HN

At these airports we've lost the human caring, the human service-related element that makes America great. - I think that there's no demonstrable security value for the majority of these projects, and since 2001 we've allowed the defense industry to ingrain top-heavy industrialized defense projects into our daily American life - militarizing America. Along the way we've lost some of our true values and this doesn't make us a better, safer country. Where's the article about saving a stranded man and helping reunite him with his family?

The possibility that they would have locked down a major airport, stranding thousands of travelers and generating millions of dollars in lost revenues would have been a true farce. How many armed guards could you hire, trained to HELP as well as protect, for the cost of a $100 Million lemon defense system? At least we would be helping solve the unemployment problem, rather than pumping countless millions into the coffers of international defense companies like Raytheon.

Then they'd have a legitimate reason to fine him millions of dollars for being lost and stranded.

A simple alarm(1) would have sent a patrol car out to investigate.

Sorry, but no. They're covering miles of outdoor perimeter. The problem is that there are very few technologies that can reliably detect things like people, while ignoring things like various animals (or heat from jet engines, etc.).

I don't know when they erected this security system, but shouldn't this be a much smaller problem now with the progress in image processing? Put up a bunch of cameras and let humans weed out the false positives?

This system is/was actually using video analytics as part of the overall strategy.

Video analytics can be very reliable, but you can't rely on humans to weed out the false positives very effectively. I've heard of (heard of, as in been involved in replacing them) video analytics systems that generated hundreds of false alarms per night on similar sized deployments. Any human operator is going to quickly become immune to the alerts when they happen at that rate.

Ported Coaxial Cable Sensor (or leaky cable) has been around for a very long time(1) and was quite reliable even before the advent of computerized DSP to help with detection.

(1)I think you could buy them commercially at least as early as the 70's

Buried coax and fiber detection systems tend to rank in the bottom 1/3rd of overall reliability (just above the systems that try to detect fence movement and tension changes).

In fact, I rarely hear of new deployments considering these technologies (though I'm sure there are plenty of them, as the companies are still in business).

> there are very few technologies that can reliably detect things like people, while ignoring things like various animals (or heat from jet engines, etc.).

If a 100MM taxpayer funded system can't tell the difference between a jet engine heat output and a person's heat signature, then someone should be criminally liable for defrauding us.

And as far as differentiating a deer from a human, it should have detected the moving object, sent the images to a person sitting in front of a computer, and he/she could have classified the object.

First off, the 100MM was a total expenditure across several airports, for multiple aspects of their security systems. It was not all spent on the fence perimeter system at JFK.

JFK is a complex airport, I'm not aware of the specific length of the perimeter they are covering there, but it's likely between 8 and 15 miles of perimeter fence line. You need something with a high degree of reliability and false alarm immunity to make this work. This is especially true because the fact is that the probability of a real terrorist incursion is pretty low. So, the guards aren't going to stay actively engaged with reviewing alarms for very long if essentially 99.9% of what they see are all false alarm/no-action events.

A similar thing happend in Australia, when a man got off a boat on Sydney harbour wharf belonging to the Prime Ministers residence rather than a public one. He was dressed in camo style pants and had to climb a wall into the compound to get off the wharf.

Nothing much happened to him, as the Prime Minister was not there at the time.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/kirribillis-accidental-i...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com